brother's height. Although the upper part of his face and head was
handsomely formed, and bounded by lines of sufficiently masculine
regularity, his brows were somewhat too softly arched, and finely
pencilled for one of his sex; without prejudice, however, to the belief
which the sum total of his features inspired--that though they did not
prove that the man who thought inside them would do much in the
world, men who had done most of all had had no better ones. Across his
forehead, otherwise 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 architect of
his sister as freely as to Cytherea of the young architect.

A conversation began, which was none the less interesting to the parties
engaged because it consisted only of the most trivial and commonplace
remarks. Then the band of harps and violins struck up a lively melody,
and the deck was cleared for dancing; the sun dipping beneath the
horizon during th