A Chance Meeting

"Can you let me have the same room, Tom?" he questioned familiarly of
the man ornamenting the high stool behind the desk.

The latter, busy with some figures, nodded carelessly, and the last
arrival promptly picked up his valise from the floor and began climbing
the stairs, whistling softly. He was a long-limbed, broad-chested
young fellow, with clean-shaven face, and a pair of dark-gray eyes that
looked straight ahead of him; and he ran up the somewhat steep steps as
though finding such exercise a pleasure. Rounding the upper railing,
he stopped abruptly before Number Twenty-seven, flung open the door,
took a single step within, and came to a sudden pause, his careless
whistling suspended in breathless surprise. With that single glance
the complete picture became indelibly photographed upon his
memory,--the narrow, sparsely furnished room with roughly plastered
walls; the small, cheap mirror; the faded-green window curtain, torn
half in two; the sheet-iron wash-stand; the wooden chair, across which
rested the gray coat with the blue toque on top; and the single cot bed
bearing its unconscious occupant.

Somehow as he gazed, his earliest conscious emotion was that of
sympathy--it all appeared so unspeakably pathetic, so homesick, so
dismally forlorn and barren. Then that half-upturned face riveted his
attention and seemed to awaken a vague, dreamy memory he found himself
unable to localize; it reminded him of some other face he had known,
tantalizing from its dim indistinctness. Then this earlier impression
slightly faded away, and he merely beheld her alone, a perfect stranger
appropriating little by little her few claims to womanly beauty. There
was no certain guessing at her age as she lay thus, one hand pressed
beneath her cheek, her eyes closed, the long, dark lashes clearly
outlined against the white flesh, her bosom rising and falling with the
steady breathing of absolute exhaustion. She appeared so extremely
tired, discouraged, unhappy, that the young man involuntarily closed
his teeth tightly, as though some wrong had been personally done to
himself. He marked the dense blackness of her heavy mass of hair; the
perfect clearness of her skin; the shapeliness of the slender,
outstretched figure; the narrow boot, with its high-arched instep,
peeping shyly beneath the blue skirt; the something rarely interesting,
yet which scarcely made for beauty, revealed unconsciously in the
upturned face with its rounded chin and parted lips.