Hyacinth turned on him staring and at once provoked and baffled by his ambiguous part in an incident it was doubtless possible to magnify but not possible to treat as perfectly simple. “Certainly I’ve been to the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and pressed me to go, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the devil are you, anyway, and what do you want of me?” our hero cried—his mind flooded in a moment with everything in the Captain that had puzzled and worried and escaped him. This swelling tide obliterated on the spot everything that had beguiled. “My dear fellow, whatever I am I’m not an ass,” this gentleman replied with imperturbable good-humour. “I don’t reproach you with anything. I only wanted to put in a word as a peacemaker. My good friends—my good friends,” and he laid a hand in his practised way on Hyacinth’s shoulder while with the other pressed to his heart he bent on the girl a face of gallantry which had something paternal in it: “I’m determined this absurd misunderstanding shall end as lovers’ quarrels ought always to end.” Hyacinth withdrew himself from the Captain’s touch and said to Millicent: “You’re not really jealous of—of any one. You pretend that only to throw dust in my eyes.” To this sally Miss Henning returned him an answer which promised to be lively, but the Captain swept it away in the profusion of his protests. He declared them a dear delightful abominable pair; he pronounced it rarely interesting to see how in people of their sort the prime passions lay near the surface; he almost pushed them into each other’s arms and then wound up with proposing that they should all terminate their little differences by proceeding together to the Pavilion music-hall, the nearest place of entertainment in that neighbourhood, leaving the lady’s-maid in Curzon Street to dress her mistress’s wig in peace. He has been presented to the reader as an accomplished man, and it will doubtless be felt that the picture is justified by his having eventually placed this idea in so attractive a light that his companions entered a hansom with him and rattled toward the haunt of pleasure, Hyacinth sandwiched, on the edge of the seat, between the others. Two or three times our young man’s ears burned; he felt that if there was an understanding between them they had now, behind him, a rare opportunity for carrying it out. If this understanding flourished at his expense the whole evening constituted for them indeed an opportunity, and that thought rendered his diversion but scantly absorbing, though at the Pavilion the Captain engaged a big private box and ordered ices brought in. Hyacinth cared so little for his little pink pyramid that he suffered Millicent to consume it after she had disposed of her own. It was present to him, however, that if he should make a fool of himself the folly would be of a very gross kind, and this is why he withheld a question repeatedly on his lips—the impulse