The writing was a woman’s, but it had surely taken its character from certain features of her own:  it was clear, firm, individual.  It had nothing of that air of general debility which usually marks the manuscript of young ladies, yet its firmness was far removed from the stiff, conventional slope which all Englishwomen seem to acquire in youth and retain through life.  I don’t see how any man in my situation could have helped reading a few lines—­if only for the sake of restoring lost property.  But I was drawn on, and on, and finished by reading all:  thence, since no further harm could be done, I reread, pondering over certain passages until they stayed with me.  Here they are, as I set them down, that evening, on the back of a legal blank: 

“It makes a great deal of difference whether we wear social forms as bracelets or handcuffs.”

“Can we not still be wholly our independent selves, even while doing, in the main, as others do?  I know two who are so; but they are married.”

“The men who admire these bold, dashing young girls treat them like weaker copies of themselves.  And yet they boast of what they call ’experience’!”

“I wonder if any one felt the exquisite beauty of the noon as I did to-day?  A faint appreciation of sunsets and storms is taught us in youth, and kept alive by novels and flirtations; but the broad, imperial splendor of this summer noon!—­and myself standing alone in it—–­yes, utterly alone!”

“The men I seek must exist:  where are they?  How make an acquaintance, when one obsequiously bows himself away, as I advance?  The fault is surely not all on my side.”

There was much more, intimate enough to inspire me with a keen interest in the writer, yet not sufficiently so to make my perusal a painful indiscretion.  I yielded to the impulse of the moment, took out my pencil, and wrote a dozen lines on one of the blank pages.  They ran something in this wise: 

“IGNOTUS IGNOTAE!—­You have bestowed without intending it, and I have taken without your knowledge.  Do not regret the accident which has enriched another.  This concealed idyl of the hills was mine, as I supposed, but I acknowledge your equal right to it.  Shall we share the possession, or will you banish me?”

There was a frank advance, tempered by a proper caution, I fancied, in the words I wrote.  It was evident that she was unmarried, but outside of that certainty there lay a vast range of possibilities, some of them alarming enough.  However, if any nearer acquaintance should arise out of the incident, the next step must be taken by her.  Was I one of the men she sought?  I almost imagined so—­certainly hoped so.