"I'm very much obliged to you," she said; "you did not hurt me at all. Thank you," she added, looking back to him as she opened the door of the opposite house with a key which she held in her hand. The door closed, and she was gone ere Tracy could find words to detain her; but if ever there was a case of love at first sight, this was one. Short as had been the interview, she carried his heart with her. For some minutes he stood staring at the house, too much surprised and absorbed in his own feelings to be aware that, as is always the case if a man stops to look at anything in the street, he was beginning to collect a little knot of people about him, who all stared in the same direction too, and were asking each other what was the matter. Warned by this discovery, the young soldier proceeded on his way; but so engrossed and absent was he, that he had strode nearly a quarter of a mile beyond the laundress' cottage before he discovered his error. On his return, he contrived to walk twice past the house; but he saw nothing of the girl. He had a mind to go into the apothecary's and make some inquiry about her; but that consciousness which so often arrests such inquiries arrested his, and he went home, knowing no more than his eyes and ears had told him--namely, that this young damsel had the loveliest face and the sweetest voice that fortune had yet made him acquainted with, and, moreover, that the possessor of these charms was apparently a person in a condition of life not superior to his own. Her dress and the house in which she lived both denoted humble circumstances, if not absolute poverty, although he felt that her countenance and speech indicated a degree of refinement somewhat inconsistent with this last conjecture. She might be a reduced gentlewoman. Tracy hoped not, for if so, poor as she was, she would look down upon him; she might, on the contrary, be one of those natural aristocrats, born Graces, that nature sometimes pleases herself with sending into the world; as in her humorous moments she not unfrequently does the reverse, bestowing on a princess the figure and port of a market-woman. Whichever it was, the desire uppermost in his mind was to see her again; and accordingly, after his master was dressed, and gone to dinner, he directed his steps to the same quarter. It was now evening, and he had an opportunity of more conveniently surveying the house and its neighborhood without exciting observation himself. For this purpose he crossed over to the apothecary's door, and looked around him. It was a mean street, evidently inhabited by poor people, chiefly small retail dealers; almost every house in it being used as a shop, as appeared from the lights and the merchandise in the windows, except the one inhabited by the unknown beauty. They were all low buildings of only two stories; and that particular house was dark from top to bottom, with the exception of a faint stripe of light which gleamed from one of the lower windows, of