When Mr. King and Irene walked up and down the corridor after breakfast the girl’s constraint seemed to have vanished, and she let it be seen that she had sincere pleasure in renewing the acquaintance.  King himself began to realize how large a place the girl’s image had occupied in his mind.  He was not in love—­that would be absurd on such short acquaintance—­but a thought dropped into the mind ripens without consciousness, and he found that he had anticipated seeing Irene again with decided interest.  He remembered exactly how she looked at Fortress Monroe, especially one day when she entered the parlor, bowing right and left to persons she knew, stopping to chat with one and another, tall, slender waist swelling upwards in symmetrical lines, brown hair, dark-gray eyes—­he recalled every detail, the high-bred air (which was certainly not inherited), the unconscious perfect carriage, and his thinking in a vague way that such ease and grace meant good living and leisure and a sound body.  This, at any rate, was the image in his mind —­a sufficiently distracting thing for a young man to carry about with him; and now as he walked beside her he was conscious that there was something much finer in her than the image he had carried with him, that there was a charm of speech and voice and expression that made her different from any other woman he had ever seen.  Who can define this charm, this difference?  Some women have it for the universal man—­they are desired of every man who sees them; their way to marriage (which is commonly unfortunate) is over a causeway of prostrate forms, if not of cracked hearts; a few such women light up and make the romance of history.  The majority of women fortunately have it for one man only, and sometimes he never appears on the scene at all!  Yet every man thinks his choice belongs to the first class; even King began to wonder that all Newport was not raving over Irene’s beauty.  The present writer saw her one day as she alighted from a carriage at the Ocean House, her face flushed with the sea air, and he remembers that he thought her a fine girl.  “By George, that’s a fine woman!” exclaimed a New York bachelor, who prided himself on knowing horses and women and all that; but the country is full of fine women—­this to him was only one of a thousand.

What were this couple talking about as they promenaded, basking in each other’s presence?  It does not matter.  They were getting to know each other, quite as much by what they did not say as by what they did say, by the thousand little exchanges of feeling and sentiment which are all-important, and never appear even in a stenographer’s report of a conversation.  Only one thing is certain about it, that the girl could recall every word that Mr. King said, even his accent and look, long after he had forgotten even the theme of the talk.  One thing, however, he did carry away with him, which set him thinking.  The girl had been reading the “Life of Carlyle,”