I suppose most men, even in old age, feel a certain anxiety, conscious or not, as they overtake a woman whose back view is in the least attractive. I confess that I felt a more than usual, indeed a quite irrational, perturbation of the blood, as, coming level with her, I dared to look into her face. As I did so she involuntarily turned to look at me--turned to look at me, did I say? "To look" is a feeble verb indeed to express the unexpected shock of beauty to which I was suddenly exposed. I cannot describe her features, for somehow features always mean little to me. They were certainly beautifully moulded, and her skin was of a lovely pale olive, but the life of her face was in her great violet eyes and her wonderful mouth. Thus suddenly to look into her face was like unexpectedly to come upon moon and stars reflected in some lonely pool. I suppose the look lasted only a second or two; but it left me dazzled as that king in the Eastern tale, who seemed to have lived whole dream-lives between dipping his head into a bowl of water and taking it out again. Similarly in that moment I seemed to have dived into this unknown girl's eyes, to have walked through the treasure palaces of her soul, to have stood before the flaming gates of her heart, to have gathered silver flowers in the fairy gardens of her dreams. I had followed her white-robed spirit across the moonlit meadows of her fancy, and by her side had climbed the dewy ladder of the morning star, and then suddenly I had been whirled up again to the daylight through the magic fountains of her eyes. I'll tell you more about that look presently! Meanwhile the gig approached, and the two girls exchanged affectionate greetings. "Tom hasn't come with you, then?" said the other girl, who was evidently her sister, and who was considerably more rustic in style and accent. She said it with a curious mixture of anxiety and relief. "No," answered the other simply, and I thought I noticed a slight darkening of her face. Tom was evidently her husband. So she was married! "Yes!" said a fussy hypocrite of reason within me, "and what's that to do with you?" "Everything, you fool!" answered a robuster voice in my soul, kicking the feeble creature clean out of my head on the instant. For, absurd as it may sound, with that look into those Arabian Nights' eyes, had come somewhere out of space an overwhelming intuition, nay, an unshakable conviction, that the woman who was already being rolled away from me down the road in that Dis's car of a farmer's gig, was now and for ever and before all worlds the woman God had created for me, and that, unless I could be hers and she mine, there would be no home, no peace for either of us so long as we lived. And yet she was being carried away further and further every moment, while I gazed after her, aimlessly standing in the middle of the road. Why did I not call to her, overtake her? In a few moments she would be lost to me for ever--