She gave a great sigh, and turned her attention to the orchestra, that was beginning to tune up for the second act. “You will have a cold journey,” she said. “Good-bye!” He echoed her adieu with a composed gallantry, and stepped from the box, a man of ice. Humming (horribly out of tune, it must be said) a fragment of some late-heard melody, he lounged through his tier of the auditorium, and even paused, before leaving the house, at a point whence he could obtain a comprehensive view of the assembly. Here, glancing down into the pit, his gaze was instantly riveted upon the figure of a man that sat, lolling in an ungainly manner, against the wooden partition that enclosed the orchestra. “Now, by Heaven,” muttered the observer, “if you are not my old friend of the fishing-rod, there is no virtue in the name of Brander!” As he thus spoke under his breath, the man below, moved by that telepathic force that is called sympathy, looked up, and catching the other’s eye, started violently, and immediately shifted his position so as to present nothing but a back of rusty broadcloth to the inquisition of the boxes. “And so my suspicion is confirmed,” thought Tuke; and made his way to the vestibule. Walking on the stilts, so as to speak, of a sort of incensed exaltation, he issued from the theatre to find a wet sleet falling. The loaded flakes hissed in the torches of the link boys; the whole pavement resounded with the clink of pattens. “And here is the appropriate wet blanket,” muttered our friend, “to the bed of my own making. I will e’en back to broiled bones and a noggin of punch by the fire.” CHAPTER XXXII. There is a curious anomaly about the way in which a self-confidence, impervious to the stabs of ill-fortune, may be paralyzed in a moment by the little prick of a snub irresponsible. Now, I would not go so far as to say that the _sang-froid_ shown by Mr. Tuke over his virtual dismissal by Miss Royston represented the real state of his feelings; or that he did not find his appetite for a certain fruit stimulated by his disappointment of it. But, without doubt, the sting that most rankled for the moment in his vanity was that tart little rebuke administered to him by the aristocratic carline in the theatre-lobby. It was absurd, it was inexplicable--but so it was. His sense of injury in the greater matter was quite overcrowded by his feeling of humiliation in the lesser. That was a little snake, but it swallowed all the rest--so elastic is a proud stomach.