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186 her, and so did we; a breath of the coming spring seemed blowing in our direction thence.

"Is she to your taste?" Gina asked her fiance, with a curiosity in her tone of voice that she strove to make light of.

"What did you say?—oh, I don't know, didn't see her," he returned, wool-gathering as usual.

Wishing to please her, he again turned round to look; but the whole company had already disappeared in the doorway of a neighbouring restaurant.

Gina took his arm, with a gesture of famished and baffled desire. Laying her head on the sleeve of his great-coat, she brushed a wisp of hair from her cheek.

"No," she said to me in an undertone; "no, I cannot tell; I myself am ignorant of the end for which suffering exists; why must there always be suffering?"

Still Owinski heard not a word we said; so we could converse quite freely. For my part, I could not love a man so continually lost in thought.

"Seldom have I happened upon a type in such sharp contrast to all that I am," she