So I too began to pick up at random several old volumes.
An English one caught my glance—
It was a copy of Browning—old and tattered—and pencil-marked. Turning to the fly-leaf I saw a name, written in a woman's hand—
Victoria O'Fallon—Paris 18—
I looked up—and saw far back into now almost forgotten years of my life and there flashed into unaccountable and extraordinary vividness in my mind the remembrance of a western mining camp and of a girl, Vicky O'Fallon. She was a little red-headed beauty, who dreamed and talked of nothing but the stage, who longed to study and to travel, to release her life from the coarse and rude environment in which she lived.
And I questioned almost passionately, could that little, discontented Irish girl be the same one whose name on an old yellowing page was intriguing my thought? How came her book here among these old volumes? Had some strange fate transplanted her to Paris in the year 18—? Had her dreams come true and was she on the stage in this great city of the world? I asked of the bookseller how this copy of Browning had come into his hands. He did not know.
I could not dismiss this girl, I could not forget the book.
Somewhere, somehow she had read Browning. She obsessed my mind.
She possessed my waking hours. I wandered from theatre to theatre, watching at the stage doors, and saw play after play, always in the hope of discovering this girl I had scarcely known. I studied hotel registers, old play-bills, and always old books. I had not thought of her for years and now I desired more than anything else in life to see once more her dancing blue eyes and hear again her laughter.
But it was all in vain that I scanned faces in the streets, in railway stations, in passing cabs. I could find no trace of Victoria O'Fallon.