



Produced by David Widger





THE HERMIT OF ------ STREET.

By Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)

Copyright, 1898, by Anna Katharine Rohlfs




CHAPTER I. I COMMIT AN INDISCRETION.

I should have kept my eyes for the many brilliant and interesting sights
constantly offered me. Another girl would have done so. I myself might
have done so, had I been over eighteen, or, had I not come from
the country, where my natural love of romance had been fostered by
uncongenial surroundings and a repressed life under the eyes of a severe
and unsympathetic maiden aunt.

I was visiting in a house where fashionable people made life a perpetual
holiday. Yet of all the pleasures which followed so rapidly, one upon
another, that I have difficulty now in separating them into distinct
impressions, the greatest, the only one I never confounded with any
other, was the hour I spent in my window after the day's dissipations
were all over, watching--what? Truth and the necessities of my story
oblige me to say--a man's face, a man's handsome but preoccupied face,
bending night after night over a study-table in the lower room of the
great house in our rear.

I had been in the city three weeks, and I had already received--pardon
the seeming egotism of the confession--four offers, which, considering I
had no fortune and but little education or knowledge of the great world,
speaks well for something: I leave you to judge what. All of these
offers were from young men; one of them from a very desirable young man,
but I had listened to no one's addresses, because, after accepting them,
I should have felt it wrong to contemplate so unremittingly the face,
which, for all its unconsciousness of myself, held me spell-bound to an
idea I neither stopped nor cared to analyze.

Why,