Only one member of the little group apparently belonged to another station in life. He occupied the one easy-chair the house boasted, an ungainly piece of upholstery, much the worse for wear.
His face was pale, somewhat sallow in colouring. The features were refined and delicately chiselled. The brown, melancholy eyes were shaded by long black lashes, which when he looked down cast a heavy fringe of shadow on his thin cheeks. Though he must certainly have been the youngest of them all, having hardly completed his twenty-second year, he looked like a man who had long ago ceased to take any pleasure in the mere frivolities of life.
On his smooth, square brow were lines that denoted energy and defiance, and in the blue hollows round his eyes lay traces of a past sorrow. He wore a grey overcoat that seemed too narrow across the shoulders, and beneath it a woollen shirt finely tucked, and ornamented with a row of mother-of-pearl buttons. The only military thing about him was the forage-cap bearing the Landwehr badge, which he had pushed on to the back of his head, to prevent the hard edge pressing on the scarcely healed wound which made a lurid streak on his forehead, close to where the dark hair clustered in heavy masses.
He was the cynosure of all eyes. Every one waited anxiously for him to take the lead in conversation. Next to him, on his right, sat a muscular youth, not much older than himself, who regarded him with unceasing and tender solicitude. To all appearances he was the host. There was a patch of white plaster on one of his temples, but his round, jovial face beamed radiantly nevertheless out of its frame of unkempt fair hair that hung about his neck and throat in wildest confusion.
"I say, lieutenant, you are positively drinking nothing," he exclaimed, pushing the bottle nearer him. "Because you aren't used to our beer, and still less used to our schnaps, there's no reason why you should be shy of swilling that red stuff of which we have plenty to spare.... We aren't rich, as you know, but if you stopped here till Doomsday we could supply you every day with a bottle like that. Couldn't we, lads?"
The others assented, and pressed round him eagerly to clink their mugs and liqueur-glasses against his cracked wine-glass.