But on the flat, warm rock overhanging the tarn—­my special throne—­lay some withering wild-flowers, and a book!  I looked up and down, right and left:  there was not the slightest sign of another human life than mine.  Then I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and listened; there were only the noises of bird and squirrel, as before.  At last I took up the book, the flat breadth of which suggested only sketches.  There were, indeed, some tolerable studies of rocks and trees on the first pages; a few not very striking caricatures, which seemed to have been commenced as portraits, but recalled no faces I knew; then a number of fragmentary notes, written in pencil.  I found no name, from first to last; only, under the sketches, a monogram so complicated and laborious that the initials could hardly be discovered unless one already knew them.

The writing was a woman’s, but it had surely taken its character from certain features of her own:  it was clear, firm, individual.  It had nothing of that air of general debility which usually marks the manuscript of young ladies, yet its firmness was far removed from the stiff, conventional slope which all Englishwomen seem to acquire in youth and retain through life.  I don’t see how any man in my situation could have helped reading a few lines—­if only for the sake of restoring lost property.  But I was drawn on, and on, and finished by reading all:  thence, since no further harm could be done, I re-read, pondering over certain passages until they stayed with me.  Here they are, as I set them down, that evening, on the back of a legal blank: 

   “It makes a great deal of difference whether we
   wear social forms as bracelets or handcuffs.”

   “Can we not still be wholly our independent
   selves, even while doing, in the main, as others
   do?  I know two who are so; but they are married.”

   “The men who admire these bold, dashing
   young girls treat them like weaker copies of themselves. 
   And yet they boast of what they call ‘experience!’”

“I wonder if any one felt the exquisite beauty of the noon as I did, to-day?  A faint appreciation of sunsets and storms is taught us in youth, and kept alive by novels and flirtations; but the broad, imperial splendor of this summer noon!—­and myself standing alone in it—­yes, utterly alone!”

“The men I seek must exist:  where are they?  How make an acquaintance, when one obsequiously bows himself away, as I advance?  The fault is surely not all on my side.”

There was much more, intimate enough to inspire me with a keen interest in the writer, yet not sufficiently so to make my perusal a painful indiscretion.  I yielded to the impulse of the moment, took out my pencil, and wrote a dozen lines on one of the blank pages.  They ran something in this wise: