Armand Dupleisis, in his seat over the sea, stared absently at the jocose revelers, for he was a stranger in a strange land.  He leaned back on the granite railings with the easy indolence of an invalid, though his frame was robust and sinewy as a mountaineer’s.  The hidden power of his bronzed and Moresque features, if developed, might inspire a certain amount of wonder; but then you would as readily have sought expression in the statues below.  His gaze was almost indifferent; yet the unmoving eyes took a mental inventory of everything.  Had their owner been provided with a memorandum-book and a stubby pencil, the catalogue could not have been more complete.

Among the hundreds present, those eyes picked out one man and one woman.  They followed them in their rambles through the dome-roofed shelters; they scrutinized them as they lingered near the band; they searched them out when mingled with the throngs on the promenade.  They did not seem to be watching, but they were; and their owner did not look interested, but he was.

The man, physically speaking, was a marvel; but there was an air of foppish elegance in his movements, and a silky kind of beauty, like that of a leopard.  His head was small, but finely formed, and covered with flossy hair black as ebony.  His features, though clearly cut, wore, from their extreme delicacy, an almost feminine expression.  His hands were small and exquisitely shaped; his mustache curled gracefully from his lip; and, when speaking, he bit the ends of it in a nervous, almost embarrassed way.

The woman was a proud, passionate daughter of the sun.  The brown blood of the sun burned in her veins, and the soul of the sun streamed shaded from her eyes.  A sumptuous splendor mingled, moist and languid, with their light.  She was clothed in the sunlight.  It glistened in the soft darkness of her hair; it glowed in the rubies that clung to her swelling throat; it flashed on her robe tremulous with radiance.  From a coquettish little hat a long white plume fluttered over her curls, and a floating cloud of fleecy under-sleeve half concealed an arm of snowy purity.  Her life, though in its spring, seemed goldened with the flush of summer; her morning flashed with the meridian luster of perfect day; and yet the eyes that scanned so closely remained undazzled.  Their owner had heard of her, and of her conversation, sparkling with wit and humor and mocking irony; but he was not fascinated.  He saw but a woman for whom no surprises appear to survive.  What see we?

Were you to question the crowd, they would tell you the man was Edgar Fay; that, years before, his father brought him, a velvet-coated boy, to Rio de Janeiro; that shortly afterward he died, leaving the son and a baby sister a small fortune; that the sister, being under the control of a mother who had deserted her husband, was never heard of; and that the guardians, finding no coheir, had spent the money on Edgar’s education, afterward securing him a position under the Imperial government.