Unconscious of the fact that he was marching straight upon his fate, he passed along looking into the shops, strange shops without glass fronts or names, black shadows under arched doorways, shadows shewing merchandise and coloured people, shadows casting perfumes of flowers and fruit, garlic scents.
He was crossing the little square where the diamond fountain jet was dancing and singing in the sun, when he saw before him the figure of a girl. She was coming along in the full blaze of light, a girl of scarcely sixteen, tall, swift moving, and graceful as Atalanta, a porteuse, bearing on her head a tray of some merchandise covered over with a wasp-coloured scarf.
The load would have taxed a man, yet she bore it as easily as a feather; she wore no shoes, and her striped robe was caught up at the waist to give her limbs free play, shewing her leg almost to the knee.
She was of that strange race, whose blood has been mixed with the blood of the Caribs, coloured like that Grecian statuary to which during a thousand years the sun has lent some trace of his gold, till one can imagine the sunlight lingering in the honey tints of the marble.
The blue black of her hair just shewed, covered with the turban of striped material on which rested the tray.
As she came, walking erect and without a motion of the head, her dark eyes glanced from side to side, and as she reached Gaspard her eyes met his full, nor did they lower nor turn away till she had passed him.
He felt blinded as if by a flame. He turned. She was vanishing amidst the crowd in the Rue Victor Hugo. He made a step as if to follow her, then he stopped dead as though before a barrier.
The glance had only lasted a moment, yet in that moment, in a flash, they had spoken one to the other. It was as though they had recognized one another.
He could read a mysterious something in her glance, and it was as though she had said, “Ah, there you are, from away beyond the beginning of time!”
The fountain was playing in the sun and a hundred men and women were meeting and passing each other in the little Place, but it was the meeting and passing of coloured phantoms.