He followed her down-stairs mournfully when she took her departure, and Clélie and myself being left alone interested ourselves in various speculations concerning them, as was our habit.
“This Monsieur Wash,” remarked Clélie, “is clearly the lover. Poor child! how passionately she regrets him,—and thousands of miles lie between them—thousands of miles!”
It was not long after this that, on my way downstairs to make a trifling purchase, I met with something approaching an adventure. It so chanced that, as I descended the staircase of the second floor, the door of the first floor apartment was thrown open, and from it issued Mademoiselle Esmeralda and her mother on their way to their waiting carriage. My interest in the appearance of Mademoiselle in her white robes and sparkling jewels so absorbed me that I inadvertently brushed against a figure which stood in the shadow regarding them also. Turning at once to apologize, I found myself confronting a young man,—tall, powerful, but with a sad and haggard face, and attired in a strange and homely dress which had a foreign look.
“Monsieur!” I exclaimed, “a thousand pardons. I was so unlucky as not to see you.”
But he did not seem to hear. He remained silent, gazing fixedly at the ladies until they had disappeared, and then, on my addressing him again he awakened, as it were, with a start.
“It doesn't matter,” he answered, in a heavy bewildered voice and in English, and turning back made his way slowly up the stairs.
But even the utterance of this brief sentence had betrayed to my practiced ear a peculiar accent—an accent which, strange to say, bore a likeness to that of our friends downstairs, and which caused me to stop a moment at the lodge of the concierge, and ask her a question or so.
“Have we a new occupant upon the fifth floor?” I inquired. “A person who speaks English?”
She answered me with a dubious expression.
“You must mean the strange young man upon the sixth,” she said. “He is a new one and speaks English. Indeed, he does not speak anything else, or even understand a word. Mon Dieu! the trials one encounters with such persons,—endeavoring to comprehend, poor creatures, and failing always,—and this one is worse than the rest and looks more wretched—as if he had not a friend in the world.”