The audience at the Assembly Rooms that evening was not large; indeed, Stillmington spent so much money upon gentility as to have little left for pleasure. The Stillmingtonites visited one another in closed flies, which were solemnly announced towards the end of each entertainment as Colonel or Mr. So-and-so’s carriage. The distance that divided their several abodes was of the smallest, yet he was a daring innovator who ventured to take his wife on foot to a Stillmington dinner-party, rather than immure her during the brief journey in one of Spark’s flies. Concerts, however, the Stillmingtonites approved as a fashionable and aristocratic form of entertainment—not boisterously amusing, and appealing to the higher orders, for the most part through the genteel medium of foreign languages. There was generally, therefore, a fair sprinkling of the _élite_ of Stillmington in the Assembly Room on such occasions, and there was a fair sprinkling to-night—a faint flutter of fans, an assortment of patrician shoulders draped with opera cloaks of white or crimson; an imposing display of elderly gentlemen with shining bald heads and fierce gray whiskers; and, on the narrower benches devoted to the vulgar herd, a sparse assemblage of tradesmen’s wives and daughters in their best bonnets. Geoffrey Hossack sat amongst the _élite_, sick at heart, yet full of eager longing, of feverish expectancy, knowing that his only hope now was to see her thus, that the fond vain dream of being something nearer to her was ended. Nothing was left him but the privilege of dogging her footsteps, of gazing at her from among the crowd, of hearing the sweet voice whose Circean strains had wrought this madness in his mind, of following her to the end of life with his obnoxious love. ‘I shall become a modern Wandering Jew,’ he thought, ‘and she will hate me. I shall provoke her with my odious presence till she passes from indifference to aversion. I can’t help it. My destiny is to love her, and a man can but fulfil his destiny.’ She sang the old Italian song he loved so well—that melody whose pathetic tones have breathed their sad sweetness into so many ears—recalling fond memories and vain regrets, thoughts of a love that has been and is no more, of lives only beyond the grave. To Geoffrey those pensive strains spoke of love in the present—love dominant, triumphant in its springtide of force and passion. ‘Voi che sapéte che cosa è amor,’ he repeated to himself bitterly; ‘I should rather think I did. It’s the only thing I do know in the present obfuscation of my faculties.’