“Yes, he is odd-looking; but what is odder still is that I have seen him before, that his face is familiar to me, and yet that I can’t place him.”  The orchestra was playing the Prayer from Der Freischutz, but Weber’s lovely music only deepened the blank of memory.  Who the deuce was he? where, when, how, had I known him?  It seemed extraordinary that a face should be at once so familiar and so strange.  We had our backs turned to him, so that I could not look at him again.  When the music ceased we left our places, and I went to consign my friend to her mamma on the terrace.  In passing, I saw that my young man had departed; I concluded that he only strikingly resembled some one I knew.  But who in the world was it he resembled?  The ladies went off to their lodgings, which were near by, and I turned into the gaming-rooms and hovered about the circle at roulette.  Gradually I filtered through to the inner edge, near the table, and, looking round, saw my puzzling friend stationed opposite to me.  He was watching the game, with his hands in his pockets; but singularly enough, now that I observed him at my leisure, the look of familiarity quite faded from his face.  What had made us call his appearance odd was his great length and leanness of limb, his long, white neck, his blue, prominent eyes, and his ingenuous, unconscious absorption in the scene before him.  He was not handsome, certainly, but he looked peculiarly amiable and if his overt wonderment savoured a trifle of rurality, it was an agreeable contrast to the hard, inexpressive masks about him.  He was the verdant offshoot, I said to myself, of some ancient, rigid stem; he had been brought up in the quietest of homes, and he was having his first glimpse of life.  I was curious to see whether he would put anything on the table; he evidently felt the temptation, but he seemed paralysed by chronic embarrassment.  He stood gazing at the chinking complexity of losses and gains, shaking his loose gold in his pocket, and every now and then passing his hand nervously over his eyes.

Most of the spectators were too attentive to the play to have many thoughts for each other; but before long I noticed a lady who evidently had an eye for her neighbours as well as for the table.  She was seated about half-way between my friend and me, and I presently observed that she was trying to catch his eye.  Though at Homburg, as people said, “one could never be sure,” I yet doubted whether this lady were one of those whose especial vocation it was to catch a gentleman’s eye.  She was youthful rather than elderly, and pretty rather than plain; indeed, a few minutes later, when I saw her smile, I thought her wonderfully pretty.  She had a charming gray eye and a good deal of yellow hair disposed in picturesque disorder; and though her features were meagre and her complexion faded, she gave one a sense of sentimental, artificial gracefulness.  She was dressed in white muslin very much puffed and