Of course, he did not fancy anything so absurd as that he was in love with this young girl, whose face and nearness so possessed him; that was out of the question. But what he did feel was that a quality in her face had roused to new being a certain ideal which had once held him, and which in recent years had been losing its hold. Randall had an ardent and romantic nature, subdued by circumstance and rearing into conventional conformity. The passion of his life was music, and although he was a more or less earnest and successful lawyer, the hearing of good music and the cultivation of his own musical gift was the strongest interest of his life. His friends wondered that he had not married, and, to tell the truth, he wondered at that fact as much as they. If they were ignorant of his reason though, he, himself, was not. He knew well that it was because he had, so far in life, met no woman whose nature and personality made the appeal to him, and satisfied the desire of his soul, in the way that music appealed to and satisfied him, and what he wondered at was, that in all his wide acquaintance he had never seen this woman. He had grown tired of looking for her, at last, and had even deliberately considered the advisability of marrying a person who would have compelled a lowering of his ideal. A real, definite woman had been considered in this light, a woman with beauty, good breeding, position, and money, whom he thought he might win; but this woman not only was not musical herself, but she contradicted the ideal which seemed to go hand in hand with music in his soul. No, certainly he was not in love with this opposite neighbor of his, but the remarkable effect which she had had upon him was to rouse in him the belief of the possibility of realizing this vanished ideal. There was something in her that seemed to tell him that what he had dreamed of might still be. It was her face only that had done this. He had not seen the outline of her figure, for that had been concealed by a long black cloak, that was loose from neck to hem. And even more than this, he had not heard her voice. Randall had always conceived that his ideal woman would sing, though that was not a necessity with him, but he was so susceptible to the influence of sound that a coarse, or nasal, or discordant voice, even in speaking, would have killed the most fiery love that charm or beauty could arouse. He suddenly felt a great desire to know if this exquisite girl could sing, or to hear her speak. It was not so much an emotional stirring of love which she had aroused in him, as a sort of spirit of intellectual investigation. He knew that she had a face that might belong to his ideal woman, and he wondered if her voice would carry out the idea.