Of our immediate constellation, Sir Richard Maistre was the only member on whom the eye was tempted to linger.  The others were obvious—­simple equations, soluble ‘in the head.’  But he called for slate and pencil, offered materials for doubt and speculation, though it would not have been easy to tell wherein they lay.  What displayed itself to a cursory inspection was quite unremarkable:  simply a decent-looking young Englishman, of medium stature, with square-cut plain features, reddish-brown hair, grey eyes, and clothes and manners of the usual pattern.  Yet, showing through this ordinary surface, there was something cryptic.  For me, at any rate, it required a constant effort not to stare at him.  I felt it from the beginning, and I felt it to the end:  a teasing curiosity, a sort of magnetism that drew my eyes in his direction.  I was always on my guard to resist it, and that was really the inception of my neglect of him.  From I don’t know what stupid motive of pride, I was anxious that he shouldn’t discern the interest he had excited in me; so I paid less ostensible attention to him than to the others, who excited none at all.  I tried to appear unconscious of him as a detached personality, to treat him as merely a part of the group as a whole.  Then I improved such occasions as presented themselves to steal glances at him, study him a la derobee—­groping after the quality, whatever it was, that made him a puzzle—­seeking to formulate, to classify him.

Already, at the end of my first dinner, he had singled himself out and left an impression.  I went into the smoking-room, and began to wonder, over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, who he was.  I had not heard his voice; he hadn’t talked much, and his few observations had been murmured into the ears of his next neighbours.  All the same, he had left an impression, and I found myself wondering who he was, the young man with the square-cut features and the reddish-brown hair.  I have said that his features were square-cut and plain, but they were small and carefully finished, and as far as possible from being common.  And his grey eyes, though not conspicuous for size or beauty, had a character, an expression.  They said something, something I couldn’t perfectly translate, something shrewd, humorous, even perhaps a little caustic, and yet sad; not violently, not rebelliously sad (I should never have dreamed that it was a sadness which would drive him to desperate remedies), but rather resignedly, submissively sad, as if he had made up his mind to put the best face on a sorry business.  This was carried out by a certain abruptness, a slight lack of suavity, in his movements, in his manner of turning his head, of using his hands.  It hinted a degree of determination which, in the circumstances, seemed superfluous.  He had unfolded his napkin and attacked his dinner with an air of resolution, like a man with a task before him, who mutters, ‘Well, it’s got to be done, and I’ll do it.’  At a hazard, he was two- or three-and-thirty, but below his neck he looked older.  He was dressed like everybody, but his costume had, somehow, an effect of soberness beyond his years.  It was decidedly not smart, and smartness was the dominant note at the Hotel d’Angleterre.