impossible to analyse, I stood watching that retreating figure.
Afterwards I could have sworn to the man among ten thousand.

A man of about fifty, well and plainly dressed, who did not appear to be
in ill-health, yet whose complexion had a blanched look, like forced
sea-kale; a man of under, rather than over middle height, not of slight
make, but lean as if the flesh had been all worn off his bones; a man
with sad, anxious, outlooking, abstracted eyes, with a nose slightly
hooked, without a trace of whisker, with hair thin and straight and
flaked with white, active and lithe in his movements, a swift walker,
though he had a slight halt. While looking at him thrown up in relief
against the glowing western sky, I noticed, what had previously escaped
my attention, that he was a little deformed. His right shoulder was
rather higher than the other. A man with a story in his memory, I
imagined; a man who had been jilted by the girl he loved, or who had
lost her by death, or whose wife had proved faithless; whose life, at
all events, had been marred by a great trouble. So, in my folly, I
decided; for I was young then, and romantic, and had experienced some
sorrow myself connected with pecuniary matters.

For the latter reason, it never perhaps occurred to me to associate the
trouble of my new acquaintance, if he could be so called, with money
annoyances. I knew, or thought I knew, at all events, the expression
loss of fortune stamps on a man's face; and the look which haunted me
for days after had nothing in it of discontent, or self-assertion, or
struggling gentility, or vehement protest against the decrees of
fortune. Still less was it submissive. As I have said, it haunted me for
days, then the memory grew less vivid, then I forgot the man altogether.
Indeed, we shortly became so absorbed in the fight between Miss Blake
and Colonel Morris, that we had little time to devote to the