moiselle
Esmeralda and her mother on their way to their waiting carriage. My
interest in the appearance of Mademoiselle in her white robes and
sparkling jewels so absorbed me that I inadvertently brushed against a
figure which stood in the shadow regarding them also. Turning at once to
apologize, I found myself confronting a young man,--tall, powerful, but
with a sad and haggard face, and attired in a strange and homely dress
which had a foreign look.

"Monsieur!" I exclaimed, "a thousand pardons. I was so unlucky as not to
see you."

But he did not seem to hear. He remained silent, gazing fixedly at the
ladies until they had disappeared, and then, on my addressing him again
he awakened, as it were, with a start.

"It doesn't matter," he answered, in a heavy bewildered voice and in
English, and turning back made his way slowly up the stairs.

But even the utterance of this brief sentence had betrayed to my
practiced ear a peculiar accent--an accent which, strange to say, bore a
likeness to that of our friends downstairs, and which caused me to stop
a moment at the lodge of the concierge, and ask her a question or so.

"Have we a new occupant upon the fifth floor?" I inquired. "A person who
speaks English?"

She answered me with a dubious expression.

"You must mean the strange young man upon the sixth," she said. "He is a
new one and speaks English. Indeed, he does not speak anything else, or
even understand a word. _Mon Dieu!_ the trials one encounters with
such persons,--endeavoring to comprehend, poor creatures, and failing
always,--and this one is worse than the rest and looks more wretched--as
if he had not a friend in the world."

"What is his name?" I asked.

"How can one remember their names?--it is worse than impossible. This
one is frightful. But he has no letters, thank Heaven. If there should
arrive one with an impossible name upon it, I should take it to him and
run the risk."

Naturally, Clelie, to whom I related the incident, was much interested.
But it was some time before either of us saw the hero of it again,
though both of us confessed to having been upon the watch for him. The
_concierge_ could only tell us that he lived a secluded life--rarely
leaving his room in he daytime, and seeming to be very poor.

"He does not work and eats next to nothing," she said. "Late at night he
occasionally carries up a loaf, and once he treated himself to a cup of
_bouillon_ from the restaurant at the c