The vivacious nymph appeared to have affectedly run from him on the stairs--doubtless in freakish return for some liberal advances--but had suffered herself to be overtaken at last ere too late; and on the instant Israel caught sight of her, was with an insincere air of rosy resentment, receiving a roguish pinch on the arm, and a still more roguish salute on the cheek.
The next instant both disappeared from the range of the crevice; the girl departing whence she had come; the stranger--transiently invisible as he advanced behind the door--entering the room.

When Israel now perceived him again, he seemed, while momentarily hidden, to have undergone a complete transformation.
He was a rather small, elastic, swarthy man, with an aspect as of a disinherited Indian Chief in European clothes.

An unvanquishable enthusiasm, intensified to perfect sobriety, couched in his savage, self-possessed eye.

He was elegantly and somewhat extravagantly dressed as a civilian; he carried himself with a rustic, barbaric jauntiness, strangely dashed with a superinduced touch of the Parisian _salon_.

His tawny cheek, like a date, spoke of the tropic, A wonderful atmosphere of proud friendlessness and scornful isolation invested him.