But the peculiar circumstances under which I met her, and the rapt spirituality of that look which she flashed at Karl through the gathering tears, added a spice of romance to an otherwise colorless incident. The musician who extracts a thousand tumultuous words out of a single _lied ohne wörte_ can best understand the emotional flood of thought which conveys a whole volume of meaning. For an instant I experienced some glimmering perception of Karl’s sixth sense. I fancied I actually felt the physical and psychic influence of that “magnetic personality” which we all of us talk about but seldom endeavor to explain. And then “Miss Hutchinson” told me that she was not tired, “not the least little bit”; that mother and she had “dined on the train”; that it was, indeed, most kind on my part to have secured a private sitting-room for the joint and several use of our party and our party’s friends. So you see, the first impression fled quickly enough, leaving behind it a glowing streak of recollection like unto the half-remembered track of a shooting star. But, thank Heaven, in Maggie’s case it was renewed and developed and perfected until, whether under the spell of her unwavering friendship or thrilled to ecstasy by the inarticulate rapture which, at times, she drew from the infinite storehouse of the violin, in order to please those near and dear to her, I can say candidly that she was the goddess of one small circle, its Athéne and Euterpe rolled into one. Nor was it long before my wife claimed her as her greatest friend. That last saving clause is necessary. This is not _my_ love story, but, as the astute reader must have perceived long since, Maggie’s and Karl’s. Yet I shall be exceedingly surprised--almost as greatly taken aback as I was by the discoveries of the next hour--if the said reader, though an expert dissector of love stories, from the long-drawn-out wooing of Rachel by Jacob, down to the _motif_ of the very latest _crime passionel_ in Paris, shall have guessed already the reason why Maggie wept when first she met Karl in the vestibule of the Pall Mall Hotel. Apparently, we have all been standing there an unconscionably long time. Really, we have done nothing of the sort, for I am quite adept in bringing about the right combination of luggage porters, lift attendants, chambermaids and waiters, to secure the best and quickest results in making people at home in a modern big hotel. “I am so glad to be off the steamer,” sighed Mrs. Hutchinson, gratefully, as she sank into a spacious chair in our sitting-room. “Walking along the corridor just now, I caught myself wondering why the other folk using it did not lean over at absurd angles. Even yet the carpet seems to heave gently each half-minute.”