Another day of note the parish cherished, but it was merely a grave fulfilment of the first.
Upon the veranda-stoop of the Louis Quinze stood a man of apparently about twenty-eight years of age.

When you came to study him closely, some sense of time and experience in his look told you that he might be thirty-eight, though his few grey hairs seemed but to emphasise a certain youthfulness in him.

His eye was full, singularly clear, almost benign, and yet at one moment it gave the impression of resolution, at another it suggested the wayward abstraction of the dreamer.

He was well-figured, with a hand of peculiar whiteness, suggesting in its breadth more the man of action than of meditation.

But it was a contradiction; for, as you saw it rise and fall, you were struck by its dramatic delicacy; as it rested on the railing of the veranda, by its latent power.