It was not an introduction.  But for an instant the eyes of the young people met.  It seemed to Philip that it was a recognition.  Certainly the full, sweet eyes were bent on him for the second she stood there, before turning away and leaving the room.  And she looked just as true and sweet as Philip dreamed she would look at home.  He sat in a kind of maze for the quarter of an hour while Mavick was affixing his signature and giving some directions.  He heard all the directions, and carried away the papers, but he also carried away something else unknown to the broker.  After all, he found himself reflecting, as he walked down the avenue, the practice of the law has its good moments!

What was there in this trivial incident that so magnified it in Philip’s mind, day after day?  Was it that he began to feel that he had established a personal relation with Evelyn because she had seen him?  Nothing had really happened.  Perhaps she had not heard his name, perhaps she did not carry the faintest image of him out of the room with her.  Philip had read in romances of love at first sight, and he had personal experience of it.  Commonly, in romances, the woman gives no sign of it, does not admit it to herself, denies it in her words and in her conduct, and never owns it until the final surrender.  “When was the first moment you began to love me, dear?” “Why, the first moment, that day; didn’t you know it then?” This we are led to believe is common experience with the shy and secretive sex.  It is enough, in a thousand reported cases, that he passed her window on horseback, and happened to look her way.  But with such a look!  The mischief was done.  But this foundation was too slight for Philip to build such a hope on.

Looking back, we like to trace great results to insignificant, momentary incidents—­a glance, a word, that turned the current of a life.  There was a definite moment when the thought came to Alexander that he would conquer the world!  Probably there was no such moment.  The great Alexander was restless, and at no initial instant did he conceive his scheme of conquest.  Nor was it one event that set him in motion.  We confound events with causes.  It happened on such a day.  Yes, but it might have happened on another.  But if Philip had not been sent on that errand to Mavick probably Evelyn would never have met him.  What nonsense this is, and what an unheroic character it makes Philip!  Is it supposable that, with such a romance as he had developed about the girl, he would not some time have come near her, even if she had been locked up with all the bars and bolts of a safety deposit?