sombreros and stilettos and the ladies either danced the cachucha or fled from licentious pursuit; but her eyes wandered intermittently to the occupants of the boxes and stalls, concerning several of whom she had theories which she imparted to Hyacinth, while the play went on, greatly to his discomfiture, he being unable to conceive of such levity. She had the pretension of knowing who every one was; not individually and by name, but as regards their exact social station, the quarter of London in which they lived and the amount of money they were prepared to spend in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace. She had seen the whole town pass through her establishment there, and though Hyacinth, from his infancy, had been watching it at his own point of view, his companion made him feel all the characteristic points he had missed. Her interpretations differed from his largely in being so very bold and irreverent. Miss Henning’s observation of the London world had not been of a nature to impress her with its high moral tone, and she had a free off-hand cynicism which imposed itself. She thought most ladies hypocrites and had in all ways a low opinion of her own sex, which more than once before this she had justified to Hyacinth by narrating observations of a surprising kind gathered during her career as a shop-girl. There was a pleasing inconsequence therefore in her being moved to tears in the third act of the play, when the Pearl of Paraguay, dishevelled and distracted, dragging herself on her knees, implored the stern hidalgo her father to believe in her innocence in spite of circumstances appearing to condemn her—a midnight meeting with the wicked hero in the grove of cocoanuts. It was at this crisis none the less that she asked Hyacinth who his friends were in the principal box on the left of the stage and let him know that a gentleman seated there had been watching him at intervals for the past half-hour. “Watching _me_! I like that! When I want to be watched I take you with me.” “Of course he has looked at me,” Millicent answered as if she had no interest in denying that. “But you’re the one he wants to get hold of.” “To get hold of!” “Yes, you ninny: don’t hang back. He may make your fortune.”