He was a tall, thin man, and very old. He had the hands of a very old man, dried-up, shrunken hands, with mottled-yellow skin, dark veins that stood out like wires, and parched finger-nails. His face, too, was mottled-yellow, deepening to brown about the eyes, with grey wrinkles, and purplish lips. He was clearly very old; eighty, or more than eighty. He was dressed entirely in black: a black frock-coat, black trousers, a black waistcoat, cut low, and exposing an unusual quantity of shirt-front, three black studs, and a black tie, a stiff, narrow bow. These latter details, however, save when some chance motion on his part revealed them, were hidden by his beard, a broad, abundant beard, that fell a good ten inches down his breast. His hair, also, was abundant, and he wore it long; trained straight back from his forehead, hanging in a fringe about the collar of his coat. Hair and beard, despite his manifest great age, were without a spear of white. They were of a dry, inanimate brown, a hue to which they had faded (one surmised) from black. If it was surprising to see so old a man at a baccarat table, it was still more surprising to see just this sort of man. He looked like anything in the world, rather than a gambler. With his tall wasted figure, with his patriarchal beard, his long hair trained in that rigid fashion straight back from his forehead; with his stern aquiline profile, his dark eyes, deep-set and wide-apart, melancholy, thoughtful: he looked—what shall I say? He looked like anything in the world, rather than a gambler. He looked like a savant, he looked like a philosopher; he looked intellectual, refined, ascetic even; he looked as if he had ideas, convictions; he looked grave and wise and sad. Holding the bank at baccarat, in this vulgar company at the Grand Cercle of the Casino, dealing the cards with his withered hands, studying them with his deep meditative eyes, he looked improbable, inadmissible, he looked supremely out of place. I glanced at him, and wondered. And then, suddenly, my heart gave a jump, my throat began to tingle. I had recognised him. It was rather more than ten years since I had seen him last; and in ten years he had changed, he had decayed, terribly. But I was quite sure, quite sure. “By Jove,” I thought, “it’s Ambrose—it’s Augustus Ambrose! It’s the Friend of Man!” Augustus Ambrose? I daresay the name conveys nothing to you? And yet, forty, thirty, twenty years ago, Augustus Ambrose was not without his measure of celebrity in the world. If hardly any one had read his published writings, if few had any but the dimmest notion of what his theories and aims were, almost everybody had at least heard of him, almost everybody knew at least that there was such a man, and that the man had theories and aims—of some queer radical sort. One knew, in vague fashion, that he had disciples, that there were people here and there who called themselves “Ambrosites.”