She was sometimes among these, always graceful and girlish, with a look of innocence in her eyes like some sweet child’s, and wearing her youth and beauty like a crown, with that unique touch of dignity suggestive of a splendid future development, and that these days, lovely though they might be, were not destined to be her best. One might have pitied the hot envy he felt toward the youths who handed her the balls and applauded her play, and hung about near her, and chatted in the intervals,--so foolish, so hopeless, so bitter it was. Sometimes he heard her responses: little of note, the talk of a girl of his day and world, but animated with a sort of individuality, a something like herself,--or did he fancy it was like no one else? He had met his fate too late; this was the one woman in all the world for him. She could have made of him anything she would. His heart stirred with a vague impulse of reminiscent ambitions that might have been facts had she come earlier. He loved her, and he felt that never before had he loved. The slight spurious evanescent emotion, evoked from idleness or folly or caprice, in sundry remembered episodes of his old world, or evolved in the desert of his loneliness for Euphemia,--how vain, how unreal, how ephemeral, how unjustified! But she who would have been the supreme power in his life had come at last--and had come too late. How truly he reasoned he knew well, as he sat in his humble garb amongst his uncouth associates on the segregated bench, and heard the thunder of the balls and the swift steps of the lightly passing figures at the head of the alley; but surely he should not have been capable of an added pang when he discerned, with a sense almost as impersonal as if he were indeed the immaterial essence he claimed to be, her fate in the identity of a lately arrived guest. This was a man of middle height and slender, about thirty-five years of age, with a slight bald spot on the top of his well-shaped head. He had a keen narrow face, an inexpressive calm manner, and was evidently a personage of weight in the world of men, sustaining a high social and financial consideration. He did not take part in the game. He leaned against a pillar near her, and bent over her, and talked to her in the intervals of her play. He had apparently little affinity for youthful amusements, and spent much of his time with her parents. His mission here was most undisguised, and it seemed to the poor juggler that the fortunate suitor was but a personified conventionality, whom no woman could truly love, and who could truly love no woman.