ugh. And then, perhaps some day he
might have the good luck to meet that girl whose music he had heard
the evening when the tide turned.

He wondered what she looked like. He had passed the house often,
hoping that he might see her or hear her play again. But nothing of
that kind happened. The windows on the second floor were always
closed. A discreet inquiry at the glass door of the _concierge_ drew
out only the information that Madame Farr, the American lady, had gone
away with her two nieces for their vacation. The name conveyed nothing
to him. It would have been absurd to try to follow such a cobweb
clue, and give up his work to chase after an unknown American lady
and her invisible nieces.

Yet more and more the remembrance of that strain of music lingered
with him, strangely penetrating and significant. He played it often on
the violin. It came to be the symbol of that summer, not as it had
ended in disappointment and deception, but as it had flowed for so
many perfect weeks in pure joy and gaiety of heart. He thought of the
unseen player very kindly. He tried unconsciously to make a picture of
her in his mind--the colour of her hair, her eyes, the shape of her
face. He saw her running through the woods, or sitting between the
knees of the old hemlock beside the river. And always her hair was
blond and soft and loosely curling, her eyes of a brown so bright and
clear that it seemed to glow with hidden gold, and her face a full
oval, tinted like the petal of a great magnolia blossom.

"I am a poor fool," he would say to himself after these reveries; "why
should she have been in the least like Carola? More probably she had
freckles and red hair--but she was a girl who understood."

When August came, Richard's friends went off for a holiday, but he
stuck to his work. The heat of Paris was faint and smothering. On the
first Sunday he went out to St. Germain, loveliest of all the Parisian
suburbs, and wandered all day in the green and mossy forest. He was
lonely and depressed. Not even the cool verdure of the woods, nor the
splendour of the view from the terrace looking out over the curves of
the Seine, and the green rolling hills, and the lines of light that
led to the city beginning to glow with a pale yellow radiance in the
dusk, could console him. The merry, companionable stir of life around
him made him feel more solitary. He turned away from the gay verandah
of the _Pavillion Henry IV_, which was full of dini