said, "that I must beg you to surrender this second one." He started,
stared, blushed, pushed the chair away with awkward alacrity, and
murmured something about not having noticed that he had it.

"What an odd-looking youth!" said my companion, who had watched me, as I
seated myself beside her.

"Yes, he is odd-looking; but what is odder still is that I have seen him
before, that his face is familiar to me, and yet that I can't place him."
The orchestra was playing the Prayer from Der Freischutz, but Weber's
lovely music only deepened the blank of memory. Who the deuce was he?
where, when, how, had I known him? It seemed extraordinary that a face
should be at once so familiar and so strange. We had our backs turned to
him, so that I could not look at him again. When the music ceased we
left our places, and I went to consign my friend to her mamma on the
terrace. In passing, I saw that my young man had departed; I concluded
that he only strikingly resembled some one I knew. But who in the world
was it he resembled? The ladies went off to their lodgings, which were
near by, and I turned into the gaming-rooms and hovered about the circle
at roulette. Gradually I filtered through to the inner edge, near the
table, and, looking round, saw my puzzling friend stationed opposite to
me. He was watching the game, with his hands in his pockets; but
singularly enough, now that I observed him at my leisure, the look of
familiarity quite faded from his face. What had made us call his
appearance odd was his great length and leanness of limb, his long, white
neck, his blue, prominent eyes, and his ingenuous, unconscious absorption
in the scene before him. He was not handsome, certainly, but he looked
peculiarly amiable and if his overt wonderment savoured a trifle of
rurality, it was an agreeable contrast to the hard, inexpressive masks
about him. He was the verdant offshoot, I said to myself, of some
ancient, rigid stem; he had been brought up in the quietest of homes, and
he was having his first glimpse of life. I was curious to see whether he
would put anything on the table; he evidently felt the temptation, but he
seemed paralysed by chronic embarrassment. He stood gazing at the
chinking complexity of losses and gains, shaking his loose gold in his
pocket, and every now and then passing his hand nervously over his eyes.

Most of the spectators were too attentive to the play to have many
thoughts for each other; but