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Rh hanged if that wasn't Pauline! Can she be back at the Hague?"

But he pulled himself together, settled himself stiffly and firmly in the saddle and tried to forget his shock and the two brown-gold sparks of those laughing eyes. Well, suppose it were she: what about it? It was all so long ago; and did he not often come across the live memories of his past, looming up suddenly on his path, just like that, in the street, and did he not pass them with hardly a smile of reminiscence lurking under his moustache and just lingering in his glance? Suppose it were she: what then? Was he, who had brought all his old madness within respectable, middle-aged bounds, going to let himself be shocked by a pair of laughing eyes out of the past? . . . No, he felt himself quiet and strong, in the soberness of his later years. If his blood went coursing through his veins like that at the glance of a woman, at a memory looming up on his path, he couldn't help it. . . . Nevertheless, all that autumn day—a day which had opened dull and dark and which had remained dull and dark, with its heavy, clouded sky—was lighted for him by the two or three seconds' gay, golden gleam from those eyes. Yes, what eyes that girl Pauline had. . . Lord, what a pair of eyes! Eyes that laughed even when her mouth did not, eyes full of golden mockery, eyes which knew that they sent him raving mad with