She gave a great start and glanced up. I see her face yet--beautiful, wonderful; so beautiful and so wonderful I have never been able to forget it. Meeting my eye, she faltered out: “Did you see a man running away from here? Oh, sir, if I might have a word with you!” I came near leaping directly to the pavement in my ardor and anxiety to oblige her, but, remembering before it was too late that she was neither a Juliet nor I a Romeo, I merely answered that I would be with her in a moment and betook myself below by the less direct but safer means of the staircase. It was a short one and I was but a moment in descending, but that moment was long enough for my heart to acquire a most uncomfortable throb, and it was with anything but an air of quiet self-possession that I approached the threshold I had never before dared to cross even in fancy. The door was open and I caught one glimpse of her figure before she was aware of my presence. She was contemplating her right hand with a look of terror, which, added to her striking personality, made her seem at the instant a creature of alarming characteristics fully as capable of awakening awe as devotion. I may have given some token of the agitation her appearance awakened, for she turned towards me with sudden vehemence. “Oh!” she cried, with a welcoming gesture; “you are the gentleman from up-stairs who saw a man running away from here a moment ago. Would you know that man if you saw him again?” “I am afraid not,” I replied. “He was only a flying figure in my eyes.” “Oh!” she moaned, bringing her hands together in dismay. But, immediately straightening herself, she met my regard with one as direct as my own. “I need a friend,” she said, “and I am surrounded by strangers.” I made a move towards her; I did not feel myself a stranger. But how was I to make her realize the fact? “If there is anything I can do,” I suggested. Her steady regard became searching. “I have noticed you before to-night,” she declared, with a directness devoid of every vestige of coquetry. “You seem to have qualities that may be trusted. But the man capable of helping me needs the strongest motives that influence humanity: courage, devotion, discretion, and a total forgetfulness of self. Such qualifications cannot be looked for in a stranger.” As if with these words she dismissed me from her thoughts, she turned her back upon me. Then, as if recollecting the courtesy due even to strangers, she cast me an apologetic glance over her shoulder and hurriedly added: “I am bewildered by my loss. Leave me to the torment of my thoughts. You can do nothing for me.”