As he sat at his accustomed table, glancing through a journal, and with the light from the gaselier above shed full on his face—a face better in unison with drooping desert-palms, and a gleaming stand of rifles, and the dusky glow of a deep sunset on Niger or on Nile, for its setting and background, than with the gilt arabesques and florid hues and white gaslight of a French café—a new comer, who had entered shortly afterwards and seated himself at the same table, addressed him on some topic of the hour, and pushed him an open case of some dainty scented cigarettes.
Erceldoune courteously declined them: he always smoked his own Turkish tobacco, and would as soon have used cosmetiques as perfumed cigars; and, answering the remark, looked at the speaker. He was accustomed to read men thoroughly and rapidly, even if they carried their passports in cipher. What he saw opposite him was a gracefully made man, of most picturesque and brilliant beauty of a purely foreign type, with the eyes long, dark, and melting, and features perfectly cut as any cameo's — a man who might hare sat to a painter for Lamoral d'Egmont, or for one of Fra Moreale's reckless nobly-born Free Lances, and might have passed for five-and-thirty at the most, till he who
