exclaimed the priest.

"Don't laugh, Father. It's true, or I wouldn't have felt about her as I
did from the first moment we looked at each other. She's beautiful, but
I assure you it wasn't her beauty that made me follow her. It was
something more mysterious than that. I swear to you, it was as if her
eyes said to me, 'Why, here you are at last, you whom I've known since
the beginning of things. I am the one you've waited for all your life.'"

"All your life! Twenty-seven years, is it not?"

"Twenty-nine this month, Father. I'm not a boy, and I've cared very much
only for one woman. I wasn't twenty then, and it's partly her fault that
it's hard for me to believe in others."

"That's scarcely fair to the others. One woman isn't all womanhood."

"Ah, it's odd you should have said that, for the thought in my mind has
been that this girl--this girl who has a child's face, I tell you,
Father--seems somehow to represent womanhood, the woman of all time: the
type, you know, that no man can resist. There's a kind of divine
softness about her which calls to all there is in one of manhood--or
romance. I can't describe it."

"You have made me understand," the cure answered quietly. "And you have
made me--for your sake--want to find out as soon as I possibly can what
truth is under all this sweetness."

XI

The first question Mary asked on coming downstairs in the morning was,
"At what hour does the Casino open?"

Ten o'clock, she was told.

It was not yet nine. A long time to wait!

Most people at the Paris breakfasted in their rooms, but never in her
life had Mary eaten breakfast in her bedroom. She went to last night's
table in the great glass window of the restaurant, and was hardly sure
whether she felt relieved or disappointed not to see the young man with
the Dante profile. She did not now think him in the least like Romeo.

From the window, to her surprise, she saw a crowd collecting in front of
the Casino, whose doors were still closed.

"What is the matter?" she asked, almost alarmed, lest there had been an
accident.

"It is the early ones waiting for the doors to open," her waiter
explained. He brought her a poached egg on toast, but a superlative egg,
poached and adorned according to the conception of a French _chef_. The
air with which the silver cover was taken off and the dish shown to Mary
made her feel there was nothing she could do to show her appreciation,
without disappointing the man,