By the way a Parisian woman wraps a shawl around her, and the way she lifts her feet in the street, a man of intelligence in such studies can divine the secret of her mysterious errand.  There is something, I know not what, of quivering buoyancy in the person, in the gait; the woman seems to weigh less; she steps, or rather, she glides like a star, and floats onward led by a thought which exhales from the folds and motion of her dress.  The young man hastened his step, passed the woman, and then turned back to look at her.  Pst! she had disappeared into a passage-way, the grated door of which and its bell still rattled and sounded.  The young man walked back to the alley and saw the woman reach the farther end, where she began to mount—­not without receiving the obsequious bow of an old portress—­a winding staircase, the lower steps of which were strongly lighted; she went up buoyantly, eagerly, as though impatient.

“Impatient for what?” said the young man to himself, drawing back to lean against a wooden railing on the other side of the street.  He gazed, unhappy man, at the different storeys of the house, with the keen attention of a detective searching for a conspirator.

It was one of those houses of which there are thousands in Paris, ignoble, vulgar, narrow, yellowish in tone, with four storeys and three windows on each floor.  The outer blinds of the first floor were closed.  Where was she going?  The young man fancied he heard the tinkle of a bell on the second floor.  As if in answer to it, a light began to move in a room with two windows strongly illuminated, which presently lit up the third window, evidently that of a first room, either the salon or the dining-room of the apartment.  Instantly the outline of a woman’s bonnet showed vaguely on the window, and a door between the two rooms must have closed, for the first was dark again, while the two other windows resumed their ruddy glow.  At this moment a voice said, “Hi, there!” and the young man was conscious of a blow on his shoulder.

“Why don’t you pay attention?” said the rough voice of a workman, carrying a plank on his shoulder.  The man passed on.  He was the voice of Providence saying to the watcher:  “What are you meddling with?  Think of your own duty; and leave these Parisians to their own affairs.”

The young man crossed his arms; then, as no one beheld him, he suffered tears of rage to flow down his cheeks unchecked.  At last the sight of the shadows moving behind the lighted windows gave him such pain that he looked elsewhere and noticed a hackney-coach, standing against a wall in the upper part of the rue des Vieux-Augustins, at a place where there was neither the door of a house, nor the light of a shop-window.

Was it she?  Was it not she?  Life or death to a lover!  This lover waited.  He stood there during a century of twenty minutes.  After that the woman came down, and he then recognized her as the one whom he secretly loved.  Nevertheless, he wanted still to doubt.  She went to the hackney-coach, and got into it.