He pictured Sylvia's face also as he had often seen it--the sharply-cut little features, the suspicion of pride and self-will in aquiline nose and firmly-moulded chin, the short, roughened hair, which was such a cross to its owner, but which gave her a gallant, boyish air, which one spectator at least found irresistibly piquant. He saw the firelight play upon the pretty pink dress and the rings on the restless hands, saw the brown eyes sparkle with laughter, and grow suddenly soft and wistful. It seemed to him that they were turned towards himself, that her thoughts were meeting his half-way, that she was already repenting, and dreading the result of her hasty flight. Jack O'Shaughnessy stopped short in his pacings up and down, and stood staring before him with a strange, rapt expression. Out there in the prosaic street the greatest discovery of his life had come to him, and the wonder of it took away his breath. Young men often imagine themselves in love with half a dozen pretty faces before they have reached five-and-twenty, but to most of them there comes at last, in the providence of God, the one woman who is as far removed from the passing fancies of an hour as the moon from her attendant stars. She has appeared, and for him thenceforth there is no more doubt or change; his life is, humanly speaking, in her hands, and her influence over him is the greatest of all the talents which has been entrusted to her care. Too often he is careless about religious matters, if not actively antagonistic, and her light words may confirm him in a life of indifference; but, on the other hand, his heart is never so tender and ready to be influenced as at the moment when she has given her life into his charge, and this golden opportunity is hers to seize and turn to lasting good. In the best sense of the word she is his Queen and he is her knight, who will perform noble and gallant deeds at her behest. Jack of the humbugging eyes, handsome, happy-go-lucky Jack O'Shaughnessy, had been what he called "in love" since the days when he wore pinafores and little round collars with frills at the edge, but he had never known what love meant until this winter evening, when at the vision of Sylvia's face his heart leapt with painful violence, and he stood still appalled by the strength of his own emotions. He had known Sylvia Trevor for one month, four short weeks in all, yet now here she was occupying the foremost position in his thoughts, making the past years seem blank and empty, blocking the gate of the future with her girlish figure. Jack felt dazed and bewildered, a trifle alarmed, too, at the extent of the journey which he had travelled so unthinkingly, but he never attempted to deny its reality. He loved Sylvia--that was an established truth; the only question which remained concerned the next step in the drama.