As though the affair had been prearranged through countless ages, they turned by one accord and forced a way through the crowd that still encompassed them.  Across the Place de la Concorde they went, past the white statues, past the open space through which the soldiers were still defiling like a dark stream in a snowbound country.  Each was drawn instinctively toward the Cours la Reine—­the point from whence the stream was pouring, the point where the crowd of loiterers was sparsest, where the bare and frosted trees caught the sun in a million dancing facets.  Reaching it, the boy looked up into the stranger’s face with his fascinating look of question and interest.

“Monsieur, tell me something!  How did you know me again?  And why did you speak to me?”

The question was grave, with the charming gravity that was wont to cross his gayety as shadows chase each other across a sunlit pool.  His lips were parted naively, his curious slate-gray eyes demanded the truth.

[Illustration:  TWO SOULS, DRAWN TOGETHER, TOUCHED IN A FIRST SUBTLE FUSION]

The Irishman recognized the demand, and answered it.

“Now that you put it to me,” he said, thoughtfully, “I’m not sure that I can tell you.  There’s something about you—­” His thoughtfulness deepened, and he studied the boy through narrowed eyes.  “It isn’t that you’re odd in any way.”

The boy reddened.

“It isn’t that you’re odd,” he insisted, “but somehow you’re such a slip of a boy—­” His voice grew meditative and he recurred to his native trick of phrasing, as he always did when interested or moved.

“But why did you speak to me?  I’m not interesting.”

“Oh yes, you are!”

“How am I interesting?” There was a flash in the gray eyes that revealed new flecks of gold.

The Irishman hesitated.

“Well, I can’t explain it,” he said, slowly, “unless I tell you that you throw a sort of spell—­and that sounds absurd.  You see, I’ve knocked about the world a bit, east and west, but at the back of everything I’m an Irishman; I have a fondness for the curious and the poetical and the mysterious, and somehow you seemed to me last night to be mystery itself, with your silence and your intentness.”  He dropped his voice to the meditative key, unconsciously enjoying its soft, half-melancholy cadences, and as he spoke the boy felt some chord in his own personality vibrate to the mind that had asked for no introduction, demanded no credentials, that had decreed their friendship and materialized it.

“No,” the Irishman mused on, “there’s no explaining it.  You were mystery itself, and you fired my imagination, because I happen to come from a country of dreams.  We Irish are born dreamers; sometimes we never wake up at all, and then we’re counted failures.  But, I tell you what, when all’s said and done, we see what other men don’t see.  For instance, what do you think my two friends saw in you last night?”