“When I was in the West last summer, I spent some time in a city on the Pacific slope which has more pawnbrokers’ shops and that sort of thing in full sight on the prominent streets than any other town of the same size and respectability that I have ever seen. One day, when I had been looking in the bazaars for something a little out of the regular line in Chinese curios and didn’t find it, it occurred to me that in such a cosmopolitan town there might possibly be some interesting things in the pawn-shops, so I went into one to look. It was a common, dingy place, kept by a common, dingy man with shrewd eyes and a coarse mouth. Talking to him across the counter was a man of another type. Distinction in good clothes, you know, one is never sure of. It may be only that a man’s tailor is distinguished. But distinction in indifferent garments is distinction indeed, and there before me I saw it. A young, slight, carelessly dressed man, his bearing was attractive and noteworthy beyond anything I can express. His appearance was perhaps a little too unusual, for the contrast between his soft, straw-colored hair and wine-brown eyes was such a striking one that it attracted attention from the real beauty of his face. The delicacy of a cameo is rough,” added the connoisseur, parenthetically, “compared to the delicacy of outline and feature in a face that thought, and perhaps suffering, have worn away, but this is one of the distinctive attractions of the old. You do not look for it in young faces such as this. “On the desk between the two men lay a fine opal--this one,” said Hayden, touching the more brilliant of the two stones. “The younger man was talking eagerly, fingering the gem lightly as he spoke. I inferred that he was offering to sell or pawn it. “The proprietor, seeing that I waited, apparently cut the young man short. He started, and caught up the stone. ‘I’ll give you--’ I heard the other say, but the young man shook his head, and departed abruptly. I found nothing that I wanted in the place, and soon passed out. “In front of a shop-window a little farther down the street stood the other man, looking in listlessly with eyes that evidently saw nothing. As I came by he turned and looked into my face. His eyes fixed me as the Ancient Mariner’s did the Wedding Guest. It was an appealing yet commanding look, and I--I felt constrained to stop. I couldn’t help it, you know. Even at my age one is not beyond feeling the force of an imperious attraction, and when you are past sixty you ought to be thankful on your knees for any emotion that is imperative in its nature. So I stopped beside him. I said: ‘It is a fine stone you were showing that man. I have a great fondness for opals. May I ask if you were offering it for sale?’