Where are ye now, lustrous counts, envied dandies of that bygone time? Algy Forrester, thirty-four inches round the girth, has a son at Oxford, breeds fat sheep, and is only seen in London at cattle-show time. Cis Hetherington, duly heralded at every outlawry proclamation, lies _perdu_ in some one of the barren islands forming the Hebrides cluster. Markham Bowers fell in the Balaklava charge, pierced through and through by Cossack spearmen; and Major-general Richard Edie, M.P., is the chief adviser and the trusted agent of his mother-in-law, the Dowager Countess of Porphyry. In the next box, hiding behind the muslin curtains, and endeavouring to hide her convulsions of laughter behind her fan, sat little Pauline Désirée, _première danseuse_ at the Opera Comique, with Harry Lindon of the Coldstreams, and Prothero of the Foreign Office, and Tom Hodgson the comic writer; none of them one atom changed, all of them wonder-struck at the man in the big beard, all of them delighted at suddenly recognizing in him an old friend, not much thought of perhaps during his absence, as is the way of the world, but certainly to be welcomed now that he was once more among them. Not one atom changed; all of them just the same. What were his two years of absence, his wanderings in burning solitudes, or amongst nomadic tribes? His sudden rushing away had been undertaken with a purpose; and whether that purpose had been fulfilled was known to himself alone. He rather thought it had, as, without an extra heart-beat, he looked into a box on the pit-tier, and his grave face flashed into a sardonic grin as his eyes lit on the bald forehead and plaited shirt-frill of an elderly gentleman, instead of the light-chestnut bands and brilliant bust which once reigned dominant there on every "first night." But all the others were just the same; even the people he did not know were exactly like those whom he had left, and precisely answered to those whom he should have expected to find there. No, not all. The door of a box on the grand tier next the dress-circle opened with a clang, and a lady whom he had never seen before, coming to the front, settled herself opposite the corner in the stage. The noise of the door attracted the attention of the house; and Ventus, then playing his celebrated cornet-solo in the overture, cursed the interruption; a whisper ran round the stalls; the arrival was telegraphed to the Guards' box: this must be some star that had risen on the horizon since Laurence's absence. Ah, there is Blab Bertram at the back of the box! This, then, must be Lady Mitford!