"Why, sure! I saw him--when was it? Tuesday!--on the Jersey boat." Mr. Pitman rejoiced in his news. "_He's_ your man!" Julia too had been affected by it; it had brought, in a rich wave, her hot color back. But she gave the strangest dim smile. "He _was_!" "Then get hold of him, and--if he's a gentleman--he'll prove for you, to the hilt, that he wasn't." It lighted in her face, the kindled train of this particular sudden suggestion, a glow, a sharpness of interest, that had deepened the next moment, while she gave a slow and sad head-shake, to a greater strangeness yet. "He isn't a gentleman." "Ah, lordy, lordy!" Mr. Pitman again sighed. He struggled out of it but only into the vague. "Oh, then, if he's a pig--!" "You see there are only a few gentlemen--not enough to go round--and that makes them count so!" It had thrust the girl herself, for that matter, into depths; but whether most of memory or of roused purpose he had no time to judge--aware as he suddenly was of a shadow (since he mightn't perhaps too quickly call it a light) across the heaving surface of their question. It fell upon Julia's face, fell with the sound of the voice he so well knew, but which could only be odd to her for all it immediately assumed. "There are indeed very few--and one mustn't try _them_ too much!" Mrs. Drack, who had supervened while they talked, stood, in monstrous magnitude--at least to Julia's reimpressed eyes--between them: she was the lady our young woman had descried across the room, and she had drawn near while the interest of their issue so held them. We have seen the act of observation and that of reflection alike swift in Julia--once her subject was within range--and she had now, with all her perceptions at the acutest, taken in, by a single stare, the strange presence to a happy connection with which Mr. Pitman aspired and which had thus sailed, with placid majesty, into their troubled waters. She was clearly not shy, Mrs. David E. Drack, yet neither was she ominously bold; she was bland and "good," Julia made sure at a glance, and of a large complacency, as the good and the bland are apt to be--a large complacency, a large sentimentality, a large innocent, elephantine archness: she fairly rioted in that dimension of size. Habited in an extraordinary quantity of stiff and lustrous black brocade, with enhancements, of every description, that twinkled and tinkled, that rustled and rumbled with her least movement, she presented a huge, hideous, pleasant face, a featureless desert in a remote quarter of which the disproportionately small eyes might have figured a pair of rash adventurers all but buried in the sand. They reduced themselves when she smiled to barely discernible points--a couple of mere tiny emergent heads--though the foreground of the scene, as if to make up for it, gaped with a vast benevolence. In a word Julia saw--and as if she had needed nothing more; saw Mr. Pitman's opportunity, saw her own, saw the exact nature both of Mrs.