Hyacinth was silent for a moment. “Of course I know what you mean. But she spun her delusion—she always did, all of them—out of nothing. I can’t imagine what she knows about my ‘experience’ of any kind of scenes. I told her, when I went out of town, very little more than I told you.” “What she guessed, what she gathered, has been, at any rate, enough. She has made up her mind that you have formed a connection by means of which you will come, somehow or other, into your own. She has done nothing but talk about your grand kindred. To her mind, you know, it’s all one, the aristocracy, and nothing is simpler than that the person—very exalted, as she believes—with whom you have been to stay should undertake your business with her friends.” “Oh, well,” said Hyacinth, “I’m very glad not to have deprived you of that entertainment.” “I assure you the spectacle was exquisite.” Then the fiddler added, “My dear fellow, please leave her the idea.” “Leave it? I’ll do much more!” Hyacinth exclaimed. “I’ll tell her my great relations have adopted me and that I have come back in the character of Lord Robinson.” “She will need nothing more to die happy,” Mr Vetch observed. Five minutes later, after Hyacinth had obtained from his old friend a confirmation of Lady Aurora’s account of Miss Pynsent’s condition, Mr Vetch explaining that he came over, like that, to see how she was, half a dozen times a day—five minutes later a silence had descended upon the pair, while Hyacinth waited for some sign from Lady Aurora that he might come upstairs. The fiddler, who had lighted a pipe, looked out of the window, studying intently the physiognomy of Lomax Place; and Hyacinth, making his tread discreet, walked about the room with his hands in his pockets. At last Mr Vetch observed, without taking his pipe out of his lips or looking round, “I think you might be a little more frank with me at this time of day and at such a crisis.”