She tilted her head backward and smiled at him. David gripped his seat with his two hands, and smiled at her. She was beside an opaque cutting thing that was a woman and was a governess. Thick glasses tied to a black string that ended in a hideous enameled clasp on a white starched waist. Eyes shiny and convex like the glasses. Nose pointed down, mouth cutting in, chin pushing upward. And beside her a loveliness that came across the car and that he held now far from the car and the street, in his silence. It came to David softly that he loved this little girl. She smiled at him, as if she thanked him and were glad. Could he put his love in a smile and give it to her? She stirred in her seat. She tossed out her legs, first one, then the other. She threw herself back so that her legs thrust out, she met him fully and beamed on him. She was unafraid, beyond all he had ever known. What could he give her, and do, to show her his love? He had his eyes and his smile. To give her his life with. He put words into his look at her: till his eyes had tears of their fullness. He said to her so: “Little girl with the gray fur bonnet and the gray fur coat and the laughing soul, I love you. I have never seen you before. I shall never see you again. I shall always see you----” She was smiling so clear! What did she know? What did she not know, perhaps? Pain stopped the words of his eyes. He got up. He passed her. Why could he not touch her, why could he not come and play with her where she lived? A little girl! He stood in the street and the car groaned past him. She was kneeling on her seat and her face pressed against the window. She was motionless, gazing into him with serious lovely eyes while the car swung her away into the trackless future. David’s lips moved: “Good-by. I do not understand.... Do you?...” She was gone. Many things were gone. David, walking the dim sunless City, walked as through himself. And as he went he missed the lights that an hour before, of their own cheer, had lit the corridors of his being and made him all, all of the City, so glad a habitation. He missed these things, he learned how many they were. He did not think of the strange little girl. She had been fleckless beautiful. She had been more than that in the miracle of her spell upon him. For this he groped. In his mind was the vision of her budding life, sweet, ineffably sweet like an unopened rose in the dew of the dawn. She had left a wound in his heart--the stab of her vision--from which now his blood seemed unstintingly to flow. He thought of himself alone. Sudden all his proud contentment was away. Not clouded, this time, as it had been so often. Away. It was gone surely, like the little girl. His contentment. What then had it been? The parts of it that were no more he could piece together into a memory of his contentment.