Little sweetheart

(Printed in the United States of America)
OR,
NORMAN DE VERE’S PROTEGEE.
MRS. ALEX. McVEIGH MILLER.
HART SERIES No. 49
COPYRIGHT 1889 BY GEORGE MUNRO.
PUBLISHED BY THE ARTHUR WESTBROOK COMPANY Cleveland, O., U. S. A.
The smoking-car was draughty and ill-smelling; the three commercial travelers, with their cards and whisky, noisy to the point of rudeness, and the view from the windows of the slowly moving train was not interesting to one who had gone over the route to Jacksonville a dozen times before. The rocking motion of the train hindered reading with any comfort, and Norman de Vere flung down his newspaper impatiently and went into the ladies’ car.
“There may be some pretty women in there to look at,” he thought, idly, having an artistic taste that could interest itself for hours in traveling in watching the delicate profile of some beautiful face with a ravishing turn to chin and throat, or round cheek shaded by the curled fringe of a long, dark eyelash.
For the matter of that, any woman might have looked twice at him, too, if she had any feminine penchant for manly beauty.
Tall, broad-shouldered, symmetrically formed, with olive skin, large, flashing, dark eyes, wavy dark hair, clear-cut, handsome features, and a mouth so beautifully shaped that the absence of the conventional mustache from the short, curled upper lip seemed almost an affectation to display its beauty. Norman de Vere at two-and-twenty was a magnificent specimen of young manhood, combining in his fine person all the best elements of strength and beauty. You saw, too, from the cut and quality of his well-chosen traveling garments, and from his very air of easy indifference, that he was Fortune’s favorite—beloved of Plutus as well as Apollo.
He dropped languidly down into a seat some little distance back of the woman and child who were the sole occupants of the ladies’ car.