in the
window-seat, with my back to the light, and I had him VIS-A-VIS; a
position he would much rather have had reversed; for, at any time, he
preferred scrutinizing to being scrutinized. Yes, it was HE, and no
mistake, with his six feet of length arranged in a sitting attitude;
with his dark travelling surtout with its velvet collar, his gray
pantaloons, his black stock, and his face, the most original one Nature
ever modelled, yet the least obtrusively so; not one feature that could
be termed marked or odd, yet the effect of the whole unique. There is no
use in attempting to describe what is indescribable. Being in no hurry
to address him, I sat and stared at my ease.

"Oh, that's your game--is it?" said he at last. "Well, we'll see which
is soonest tired." And he slowly drew out a fine cigar-case, picked one
to his taste, lit it, took a book from the shelf convenient to his hand,
then leaning back, proceeded to smoke and read as tranquilly as if he
had been in his own room, in Grove-street, X---shire, England. I knew
he was capable of continuing in that attitude till midnight, if he
conceived the whim, so I rose, and taking the book from his hand, I
said,--

"You did not ask for it, and you shall not have it."

"It is silly and dull," he observed, "so I have not lost much;" then the
spell being broken, he went on. "I thought you lived at Pelet's; I went
there this afternoon expecting to be starved to death by sitting in
a boarding-school drawing-room, and they told me you were gone, had
departed this morning; you had left your address behind you though,
which I wondered at; it was a more practical and sensible precaution
than I should have imagined you capable of. Why did you leave?"

"Because M. Pelet has just married the lady whom you and Mr. Brown
assigned to me as my wife."

"Oh, indeed!" replied Hunsden with a short laugh; "so you've lost both
your wife and your place?"

"Precisely so."

I saw him give a quick, covert glance all round my room; he marked its
narrow limits, its scanty furniture: in an instant he had comprehended
the state of matters--had absolved me from the crime of prosperity. A
curious effect this discovery wrought in his strange mind; I am morally
certain that if he had found me installed in a handsome parlour,
lounging on a soft couch, with a pretty, wealthy wife at my side, he
would have hated me; a brief, cold, haughty visit, would in such a case
have been the extreme limit of his