perfectly smooth, ran one thin line, the healthy freshness of his
remaining features expressing that it had come there prematurely.

Though some years short of the age at which the clear spirit bids
good-bye to the last infirmity of noble mind, and takes to
house-hunting and investments, he had reached the period in a young
man's life when episodic periods, with a hopeful birth and a
disappointing death, have begun to accumulate, and to bear a fruit
of generalities; his glance sometimes seeming to state, 'I have
already thought out the issue of such conditions as these we are
experiencing.' At other times he wore an abstracted look: 'I seem
to have lived through this moment before.'

He was carelessly dressed in dark grey, wearing a rolled-up black
kerchief as a neck-cloth; the knot of which was disarranged, and
stood obliquely--a deposit of white dust having lodged in the
creases.

'I am sorry for your disappointment,' he continued, glancing into
her face. Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually
locked together, and the single instant only which good breeding
allows as the length of such a look, became trebled: a clear
penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving
birth to one of those unaccountable sensations which carry home to
the heart before the hand has been touched or the merest compliment
passed, by something stronger than mathematical proof, the
conviction, 'A tie has begun to unite us.'

Both faces also unconsciously stated that their owners had been much
in each other's thoughts of late. Owen had talked to the young