Florian paused and reflected. “Ah, then, you’re from Boston, no doubt,” he suggested, with charitable promptitude. The fine friends he had mentioned, at whose houses he had stopped, were all New Yorkers. “No; not from Boston,” the Vision answered with prompt negation. “Washington, I suppose?” Florian adventured again. They were the only three places a self-respecting American could admit she came from without shipwreck of her dignity. He would not pay so much grace and eloquence the very bad compliment, as it seemed to him, of supposing it could “register” from St Louis or New Orleans. The pretty woman smiled once more, a self-restrained smile. “I come from New York,” she said, simply. “I’ve lived there long. It’s my native place. But there are a good many of us there who don’t aspire to know the Roosevelts or the Livingstones.” Florian withdrew, with quiet tact, from this false departure. He led aside the conversation, by graceful degrees, to the old Dutch families, the New England stock—Emerson, Longfellow, Channing, the Concord set: Howells, James, and Stedman, the later American poets. On these last he waxed warm. But the Vision of Beauty, herself cosmopolitan to the core, was all for our newest school of English bards. She doted on Lang and Austin Dobson. “And have you seen the last _Illustrated_?” she asked, after awhile, with a burst of enthusiasm. “It’s on the table in the _salon_ there. And there are three, oh, such lovely, lovely stanzas in it,—‘Among Alps,’ by Will Deverill.” Her words sent a thrill of pleasure through Will’s modest soul. He had published but little, and ’twas seldom he heard his own name thus familiarly unhandled. Still, a harassing doubt possessed his soul. Could the Vision of Beauty have seen his name in the visitors’ book of the hotel, noticed the coincidence with the lines in the _Illustrated_, which he had sent from the Zillerthal, and managed this little _coup_ with feminine adroitness, on purpose to deceive him? Yet she didn’t look guileful. With poetic trustfulness, he cast the evil suggestion at once behind him. “I’m so glad you liked them,” he said, timidly, looking down at his plate, and playing in nervous jerks with his fork in the chicken. “I wrote them in the Tyrol here. They’re fresh-fed from the glaciers.” The Vision laid down her knife and fork and stared at him, speechless. “You’re not Will Deverill,” she exclaimed, in some excitement, after a moment’s pause. “That’s my name,” Will answered, somewhat abashed, still perusing his plate. “But I’m very little used to—to—to meeting people who have heard of it.” The pretty American clasped her hands with delight “Well, I _am_ glad to meet you,” she said, “though I’d have given you the benefit of the Mr, of course, if I’d known it was you. I just love your verses. I have ‘Voices from the Hills’ in my box upstairs, bound in calf, this minute.” “No; not really?” Will cried, with a young author’s delight at unexpected recognition.