Hyacinth was startled by her tone, but he nevertheless laughed back at her: “Ah, as I say, you’re a regular saint!” She made no reply, for at that moment the door opened and Paul Muniment’s tall figure emerged from the blackness of the staircase into the twilight, now very faint, of the room. Lady Aurora’s eyes as they rested on him seemed to declare that such a vision as that at least was life. Another person as tall as himself appeared behind him, and Hyacinth recognised with astonishment their insinuating friend Captain Sholto. Paul had brought him up for Rosy’s entertainment, being ready, and more than ready, always to introduce any one in the world, from the prime minister to the common hangman, who might give that young lady a sensation. They must have met at the “Sun and Moon,” and if the Captain, some accident smoothing the way, had made him half as many advances as he had made some other people, Hyacinth could see that it wouldn’t take long for Paul to lay him under contribution. But what the mischief was the Captain up to? It can’t be said that our young man arrived this evening at an answer to that question. The occasion proved highly festal and the hostess rose to it without lifting her head from the pillow. Her brother introduced Captain Sholto as a gentleman who had a great desire to know extraordinary people, and she made him take possession of the chair at her bedside, out of which Miss Pynsent quickly edged herself, and asked him who he was and where he came from and how Paul had made his acquaintance and whether he had many friends in Camberwell. Sholto had not the same grand air that hovered about him at the theatre; he was dressed with ingenious cheapness, to an effect coinciding, however different the cause, with poor Hyacinth’s own; but his disguise prompted our young man to wonder what made him so unmistakably a gentleman in spite of it—in spite too of his rather overdoing the manner of being appreciative even to rapture and thinking everything and every one most charming and curious. He stood out, in poor Rosy’s tawdry little room, among her hideous attempts at decoration, and looked to Hyacinth a being from another sphere, playing over the place and company a smile (one couldn’t call it false or unpleasant, yet it was distinctly not natural) of which he had got the habit in camps and courts. It became intense when it rested on our hero, whom he greeted as he might have done a dear young friend from whom he had been long and painfully separated. He was easy, he was familiar, he was exquisitely benevolent and bland—he was altogether a problem.