“Where, where?” asked Hyacinth eagerly. “Oh, I’ll tell you where when we get away from _her_.” And Muniment led him good-humouredly out. X Several months after Hyacinth had made his acquaintance, Millicent Henning remarked that it was high time our hero should take her to some first-class place of amusement. He proposed hereupon the Canterbury Music Hall; at which she tossed her head and affirmed that when a young lady had done for a young man what she had done for him the least he could do was to give her an evening at some theatre in the Strand. Hyacinth would have been a good deal at a loss to say exactly what she had done for him, but it was familiar to him by this time that she regarded him as under great obligations. From the day she had come to look him up in Lomax Place she had taken a position, largely, in his life, and he had seen poor Pinnie’s wan countenance grow several degrees more blank. Amanda Pynsent’s forebodings had been answered to the letter; the flaring cometary creature had become a fixed star. She had never spoken to him of Millicent but once, several weeks after her interview with the girl; and this had not been in a tone of rebuke, for she had divested herself for ever of any maternal prerogative. Tearful, tremulous, deferential inquiry was now her only weapon, and nothing could be more humble and circumspect than the manner in which she made use of it. He was never at home of an evening, at present, and he had mysterious ways of spending his Sundays, with which church-going had nothing to do. The time had been when often, after tea, he sat near the lamp with the dressmaker and, while her fingers flew, read out to her the works of Dickens and of Scott; happy hours of vain semblance that he had forgotten the wrong she had done him, so that she could almost forget it herself. But now he gulped down his tea so fast that he hardly took off his hat while he sat there, and Pinnie, with her quick eye for all matters of costume, noticed that he wore it still more gracefully askew than usual, cocking it with a victorious exalted air. He hummed to himself; he fingered his moustache; he looked out of window when there was nothing to look at; he seemed preoccupied, launched in intellectual excursions, half anxious and half in spirits. During the whole winter Miss Pynsent explained everything by four words murmured beneath her breath: “That beastly forward jade!” On the single occasion, however, on which she had sought relief from her agitation in an appeal to Hyacinth she didn’t trust herself to designate the girl by epithet or title. “There’s only one thing I want to know,” she said to him in a manner which might have seemed casual if in her silence, knowing her as well as he did, he had not already perceived the implication of her thought. “Does she expect you to marry her, dearest?” “Does who expect me? I should like to see the woman who does!”