how she looked, as she left the concrete bridge behind her at the
upper end of Corliss Street and turned into a shrub-bordered
bypath of the river park. In imagination she stood at the turn of
the path just ahead, watching her own approach: she saw herself as
a picture--the white-domed parasol, with its cheerful pale-green
lining, a background for her white hat, her corn-silk hair, and
her delicately flushed face. She saw her pale, live arms through
their thin sleeves, and the light grasp of her gloved fingers upon
the glistening stick of the parasol; she saw the long, simple
lines of her close white dress and their graceful interchanging
movements with the alternate advance of her white shoes over the
fine gravel path; she saw the dazzling splashes of sunshine
playing upon her through the changeful branches overhead. Cora
never lacked a gallery: she sat there herself.

She refreshed the eyes of a respectable burgess of sixty, a person
so colourless that no one, after passing him, could have
remembered anything about him except that he wore glasses and some
sort of moustache; and to Cora's vision he was as near transparent
as any man could be, yet she did not miss the almost imperceptible
signs of his approval, as they met and continued on their opposite
ways. She did not glance round, nor did he pause in his slow walk;
neither was she clairvoyant; none the less, she knew that he
turned his head and looked back at her.

The path led away from the drives and more public walks of the
park, to a low hill, thoughtfully untouched by the gardener and
left to the shadowy thickets and good-smelling underbrush of its
rich native woodland. And here, by a brown bench, waited a tall
gentleman in white.