Low as the whisper was, his ears caught it, and two sharp eyes, watching him, saw an almost imperceptible tremor of the eyelids, which was the only sign he gave. The owner of these eyes did not by any means approve of the manner in which their leader had given Miss Pembroke her music that evening, leaving the other ladies to be served as they might; still less did she approve of the coldness with which her own coquettish demands on his attention had been met. It was scarcely worth while to submit to the drudgery of rehearsing, in a chorus too, if that was to be all the return. Rising carelessly, therefore, and allowing the sheet of music on her lap to fall unheeded to the floor, Miss Carthusen sauntered off toward where Miss Ferrier's two critics sat apart, talking busily, having, apparently, as she had anticipated, written their reports of the rehearsal before coming to it. These critics were a formidable pair, for they criticised everybody and everything. One of them added to a man's sarcasm a woman's finer malice, which pricks with the needlepoint. Dr. Porson was a tall, aquiline-faced, choleric man, with sharp eyes that, looking through a pair of clear and remarkably lustrous glasses, saw the chink in everybody's armor. Those who knew him would rather see lightning than meet the flash of his glasses turned on them, and feel the probing glances that shot through, and thunder would have been music to their ears compared to the short laugh that greeted a sinister discovery. The other was Mr. Sales, the new editor of _The Aurora_, a little wasp of a man. He had twinkling black eyes that needed no lens to assist their vision, and a thin-lipped mouth with a slim black moustache hanging at either corner, like a strong pen-dash made with black ink. Dr. Porson called them quotation-marks, and had a way of smoothing imaginary moustaches on his own clean-shaven face whenever the younger man said any very good thing without giving credit for it. "A clever little eclectic," the doctor said of him. "He pilfers with the best taste in the world, and, with the innocence of a babe, believes everybody else to be original. He never writes anything worth reading but I want to congratulate him on his 'able scissors.' 'Able scissors' is not mine," the doctor added, "but it is good. I found it in _Blackwood's_." These two gentlemen had arrived early, and, seated apart, in a side-window of the long drawing-room, crunched the people between their teeth as they entered. Between the morsels, the doctor enlightened his companion, a new-comer in the city, regarding Crichton and the Crichtonians.