She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on his note-case, began to write.  Archer walked away a few steps, staring with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a note on her knee on a bench in the Common.

Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it, and put it into her pocket.  Then she too stood up.

They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined “herdic” which had carried his note to the Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.

“I told you everything was predestined!  Here’s a cab for us.  You see!” They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cab-stands were still a “foreign” novelty.

Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the Parker House before going to the steamboat landing.  They rattled through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.

Archer held out his hand for the letter.  “Shall I take it in?” he asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared through the glazed doors.  It was barely half-past ten; but what if the emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ his time, were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?

He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic.  A Sicilian youth with eyes like Nastasia’s offered to shine his boots, and an Irish matron to sell him peaches; and every few moments the doors opened to let out hot men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went by.  He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of hotels.

And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other faces.  He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel that he saw, in a group of typical countenances—­the lank and weary, the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild—­this other face that was so many more things at once, and things so different.  It was that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat, or worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or perhaps seeming so because he was so different.  Archer hung a moment on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the disappearing face—­apparently that of some foreign business man, looking doubly foreign in such a setting.  He vanished in the stream of passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.