I, of course, had never smoked in my life; and, humiliating though it was, found myself obliged to decline a “prime Havana,” proffered in the daintiest of embroidered cigar-cases.  My companion looked as if he pitied me.  “You’ll soon learn,” said he.  “A man can’t live in Paris without tobacco.  Do you stay there many weeks?”

“Two years, at least,” I replied, registering an inward resolution to conquer the difficulties of tobacco without delay.  “I am going to study medicine under an eminent French surgeon.”

“Indeed!  Well, you could not go to a better school, or embrace a nobler profession.  I used to think a soldier’s life the grandest under heaven; but curing is a finer thing than killing, after all!  What a delicious evening, is it not?  If one were only in Paris, now, or Vienna,....”

“What, Oscar Dalrymple!” exclaimed a voice close beside us.  “I should as soon have expected to meet the great Panjandrum himself!”

“—­With the little round button at top,” added my companion, tossing away the end of his cigar, and shaking hands heartily with the new-comer.  “By Jove, Frank, I’m glad to see you!  What brings you here?”

“Business—­confound it!  And not pleasant business either. A proces which my father has instituted against a great manufacturing firm here at Rouen, and of which I have to bear the brunt.  And you?”

“And I, my dear fellow?  Pshaw! what should I be but an idler in search of amusement?”

“Is it true that you have sold out of the Enniskillens?”

“Unquestionably.  Liberty is sweet; and who cares to carry a sword in time of peace?  Not I, at all events.”

While this brief greeting was going forward, I hung somewhat in the rear, and amused myself by comparing the speakers.  The new-comer was rather below than above the middle height, fair-haired and boyish, with a smile full of mirth and an eye full of mischief.  He looked about two years my senior.  The other was much older—­two or three and thirty, at the least—­dark, tall, powerful, finely built; his wavy hair clipped close about his sun-burnt neck; a thick moustache of unusual length; and a chest that looked as if it would have withstood the shock of a battering-ram.  Without being at all handsome, there was a look of brightness, and boldness, and gallantry about him that arrested one’s attention at first sight.  I think I should have taken him for a soldier, had I not already gathered it from the last words of their conversation.

“Who is your friend?” I heard the new-comer whisper.

To which the other replied:—­“Haven’t the ghost of an idea.”

Presently he took out his pocket-book, and handing me a card, said:—­

“We are under the mutual disadvantage of all chance acquaintances.  My name is Dalrymple—­Oscar Dalrymple, late of the Enniskillen Dragoons.  My friend here is unknown to fame as Mr. Frank Sullivan; a young gentleman who has the good fortune to be younger partner in a firm of merchant princes, and the bad taste to dislike his occupation.”