"Why, surely this is Mr. Durand--Nora Tracy's Cousin 'Pierre,' is it not?" she said, holding out her hand. "Ah, I see you have forgotten me." "No, indeed, Mrs. Butler, I have not!" cried Percy, giving the extended hand a thoroughly American "shake"--not the polite touch of kid-covered finger-tips, but the cordial clasp that means so much to Americans meeting in a foreign land. "How could I forget the friend and chaperone of my dear cousin. Only yesterday, in a letter I received, she spoke of you, and said she hoped it might be my good fortune to run across you. It is a pleasure I hardly expected however." Mrs. Butler, after acknowledging the speech with a few polite words, turned toward her companion. "Let me introduce you to my protege," she said. "Mr. Durand: Miss King." And Percy looked into eyes as blue, and cold, as the waters of some quiet lake sleeping under a winter moon, and saw a face as faultlessly beautiful as the features of a marble goddess. There was nothing romantic or unusual, in this very commonplace meeting between two people whose destinies were to be so tragically interwoven. Neither was powerfully impressed by, or drawn toward the other. There was no warning in either heart of the fate to come. Dolores King,--now in the perfection of her womanhood, matured by the experiences of travel, contact with the world, wide reading, and all the many advantages financial independence gives,--regarded Mr. Percy Durand as a very good-looking typical American, in his late twenties. A little too thin and blond, perhaps, to suit her ideal of masculine beauty, but a man of fine address, and possessed of a wonderfully musical voice. She felt a trifle more interest in him than she usually felt in the chance acquaintances Mrs. Butler was forever running across, from the fact that Nora Tracy, now Mrs. Phillips, who had been a great favorite and pet with Mrs. Butler, was his cousin. Percy Durand admired the exquisite beauty of Miss King's face, the graceful dignity of her bearing, and quietly analyzed her after his usual custom, while he chatted with Mrs. Butler. "A cold and reserved nature," he thought, "devoid of woman's usual vanity, proud to the verge of haughtiness, not susceptible to ordinary flattery; and she has never loved. When she does--God pity the man!"