I seem to myself to have grown very dull.  I think my wits are not so bright as they used to be.  At home, I used to be reckoned one of the pleasantest of us:  the boys used to laugh when I said things:  but not even the most hysterically mirthful could find food for laughter in my talk now.

And so the days pass; and we go to London.  Sometimes I have thought that it will be better when we get there.  At least, she will not be there.  How can she, with her husband gnashing his teeth in lonely discomfiture at his exasperated creditors, and receiptless bills, in sultry St. Thomas?  But, somehow, she is.  What good Samaritan takes out his twopence and pays for her little apartment, for her stacks of cut flowers, for her brougham and her opera-boxes, is no concern of mine.  But, somehow, there always are good Samaritans in those cases; and, let alone Samaritans, there are no priests or Levites stonyhearted enough to pass by these dear, little, lovely things on the other side.

We go out a good deal, Roger and I, and everywhere he accompanies me.  It bores him infinitely, though he does not say so.  One night, we are at the play.  It is the Prince of Wales’s, the one theatre where one may enjoy a pleasant certainty of being rationally amused, of being free from the otherwise universal dominion of Limelight and Legs.  The little house is very full; it always is.  Some of the royalties are here, laughing “a gorge deployee!” I have been laughing, too; laughing in my old fashion; not in Mrs. Zephine’s little rippling way, but with the thorough-paced, unconventional violence with which I used to reward the homely sallies of Bobby and the Brat.  I am laughing still, though the curtain has fallen between the acts, and the orchestra are fiddling gayly away, and the turned-up gas making everybody look pale.  My opera-glasses are in my hand, and I am turning them slowly round the house, making out acquaintances in the stalls, prying into the secrets of the boxes, examining the well-known features of my future king.

Suddenly my smile dies away, and the glasses drop from my trembling hands into my lap.  Who is it that has just entered, and is slipping across the intervening people in the stalls to his own seat, one of the few that have hitherto remained vacant beneath us?  Can I help recognizing the close-shorn, cameo-like beauty—­to me no beauty; to me deformity and ugliness—­of the dark face that for months I daily saw by my fireside?  Can there be two Musgraves?  No! it is he! yes, he! though now there is on his features none of the baffled passion, none of the wrathful malignity, which they always wear in my memory, as they wore in the February dusk of Brindley Wood.  Now, in their handsome serenity, they wear only the look of subdued sadness that a male Briton always assumes when he takes his pleasure.  Do you remember what Goldsmith says?—­“When I see an Englishman laugh, I fancy I rather see him hunting after joy than having caught it.”