cheeks tingling.

Next morning the shy and melancholy stranger went past with a look of
deep preoccupation, but he could not escape Caroline's gratitude;
she had opened her window and affected to be digging in the square
window-box buried in snow, a pretext of which the clumsy ingenuity
plainly told her benefactor that she had been resolved not to see him
only through the pane. Her eyes were full of tears as she bowed her
head, as much as to say to her benefactor, "I can only repay you from my
heart."

But the Gentleman in Black affected not to understand the meaning of
this sincere gratitude. In the evening, as he came by, Caroline was busy
mending the window with a sheet of paper, and she smiled at him, showing
her row of pearly teeth like a promise. Thenceforth the Stranger went
another way, and was no more seen in the Rue due Tourniquet.

It was one day early in the following May that, as Caroline was giving
the roots of the honeysuckle a glass of water, one Saturday morning, she
caught sight of a narrow strip of cloudless blue between the black lines
of houses, and said to her mother:

"Mamma, we must go to-morrow for a trip to Montmorency!"

She had scarcely uttered the words, in a tone of glee, when the
Gentleman in Black came by, sadder and more dejected than ever.
Caroline's innocent and ingratiating glance might have been taken for
an invitation. And, in fact, on the following day, when Madame Crochard,
dressed in a pelisse of claret-colored merinos, a silk bonnet, and
striped shawl of an imitation Indian pattern, came out to choose seats
in a chaise at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis and the Rue
d'Enghien, there she found her Unknown standing like a man waiting for
his wife. A smile of pleasure lighted up the Stranger's face when
his eye fell on Caroline, her neat feet shod in plum-colored prunella
gaiters, and her white dress tossed by a breeze that would have been
fatal to an ill-made woman, but which displayed her graceful form. Her
face, shaded by a rice-straw bonnet lined with pink silk, seemed to beam
with a reflection from heaven; her broad, plum-colored belt set off a
waist he could have spanned; her hair, parted in two brown bands over a
forehead as white as snow, gave her an expression of innocence which no
other feature contradicted. Enjoyment seemed to have made Caroline as
light as the straw of her hat; but when she saw the Gentleman in Black,
radiant hope suddenly eclipsed