"Before I had looked at you three minutes I felt as though I had known you all my life.

How long have we been talking here?
Ten minutes, perhaps--yet I feel as though already there is something that has cut us off from the rest of the world, and left us alone together.

There is no accounting for such strange feelings as these." "No," she replied, dreamily, "I do not think there is." "Perhaps," he continued, "I may have been fanciful all my life; but years ago, when I was a boy at school, I pictured to myself a heroine such as I thought I should love when I came to be a man." She had forgotten her sweet, half sad shyness, and sat with faint flush on her face, her lips parted, her blue eyes fixed on his.
"A heroine of my own creation," he went on; "and I gave her an ideal face--lilies and roses blended, rose-leaf lips, a white brow, eyes the color of hyacinths, and hair of pale gold." "That is a pretty picture," she said, all unconscious that it was her own portrait he had sketched.
His eyes softened and gleamed at the _naivete_ of the words.
"I am glad you think so.

Then my heroine had, in my fancy, a mind and soul that suited her face--pure, original, half sad, wholly sweet, full of poetry." She smiled as though charmed with the picture.
"Then I grew to be a youth, and then to be a man," he continued.

"I looked everywhere for my ideal among all the fair women I knew.