As I sat in the carriage and looked out at the exterior gaiety of the open-air life of Paris, my mind naturally turned in contrast to the war at home and the terrible death harvest of Antietam, news of which had lately reached Europe. The sense of isolation in a land of hostile opinion often oppressed me, and rarely was as despotic as on this afternoon. I turned for relief to speculative thought of the numberless dramas of the lives of the busy multitude among which I drove. I wondered how many lived simple and uneventful days, like mine, in the pursuit of mere official or domestic duties. Not the utmost imaginative ingenuity of the novelist could have anticipated, as I rode along amidst the hurries and the leisures of a Parisian afternoon, that my next hour or two was about to bring into the monotony of office life an adventure as strange as any which I could have conceived as possible for any human unit of these numberless men and women. Captain Merton lived so far away from the quarter in which I had been leaving cards that it was close to dusk when I got out of the carriage at the hotel I sought. I meant to return on foot, but hearing thunder, and rain beginning to fall heavily, I told Alphonse to keep the carriage. The captain was not at home. I had taken his card from my pocket to assure me in regard to the address, and as I hurried to reenter my coupe I put it in my card-case for future reference. III As I sat down in the coupe, and Alphonse was about to close the door, I saw behind him a lady standing in the heavy downfall of rain. I said in my best French: "Get in, madame. I will get out and leave you the carriage." For a moment she hesitated, and then got in and stood a moment, saying, "Thank you, but I insist that monsieur does not get out in the rain." It was just then a torrent. "Let me leave monsieur where he would desire to go." I said I intended to go to the Rue de la Paix, but I added, "If madame has no objection, may I not first drop her wherever she wishes to go?" "Oh, no, no! It is far--too far." She was, as it seemed to me, somewhat agitated. For a moment I supposed this to be due to the annoyance a ride with a strange man might have suggested as compromising, or at least as the Parisian regards such incidents. Alphonse waited calmly, the door still open. Again I offered to leave her the carriage, and again she refused. I said, "Might I then ask where madame desires to go?" She hesitated a moment, and then asked irrelevantly, "Monsieur is not French?" "Oh, no. I am an American." "And I, too." She showed at once a certain relief, and I felt with pleasure that had I been other than her countryman she would not have trusted me as she did. She added: "On no account could I permit you to get out in this storm. If I ask you to set me down in the Bois--I mean, if not inconvenient--"