and that's a fatal sign, eh? I have the
most extraordinary interest in life, which I attribute to the new
motor-car which will be finished and ready to use in a few days; also to
the thought that Graylees is my own.

But I'm wandering away from the girl.

She is as unlike Ellaline de Nesville as one beautifully bound first
volume of a human document can be from another equally attractive.
"First volume of a human document" isn't inexpressive of a young girl,
is it? Heaven knows what this one may be by the time the second and
third volumes are ready for publication; but at present one turns over
the leaves with pleased surprise. There's something original and
charming in each new page.

Her first hair must have been shed, for the present lot--and there is a
lot!--is of a bright, yellowy brown; looks like a child's hair, somehow.
There are little rings and kinks about it which I take to have been put
there by the curling-tongs of nature, though I may be mistaken. And I
suppose I must have deceived myself about the child's eyes, for they are
not black, but of a grayish hazel, which can look brown or violet at
night. She is a tall young thing, slim and straight as a sapling, with
frank, honest manners, which are singularly engaging. I look at her in
amazement and interest, and find her looking at me with an expression
which I am not able to make out. I hardly dare let myself go in liking
her, for fear of disappointment. She seems too good to be true, too good
to last. I keep wondering what ancestress of Ellaline de Nesville's, or
Fred Lethbridge's, is gazing out of those azure windows which are this
girl's eyes. If Fred's soul, or Ellaline's, peeps from behind the clear,
bright panes, it contrives to keep itself well hidden--so far. But I
expect anything.

I had no notion until now that a young woman could be a delightful "pal"
for a man, especially a man of my age. Perhaps this is my ignorance of
the sex (for I admit I locked up the book of Woman, and never opened it
again, since the chapter of Ellaline), or it may be that girls have
changed since the "brave days when we were twenty-one." At that remote
epoch, as far as I can discover by blowing off the dust from faded
souvenirs, one either made love to girls, or one didn't. They were there
to dance with and flirt with, and go on the river with, not to talk
politics to, or exchange opinions of the universe. They--the prettiest
ones--would have thought that valuable tim