Brailstone peered through his eyelashes at the same shadow of a frown where no frown sat on his friend’s brows.  Displeasure was manifest, and why?  Fleetwood had given him the dispossessing shrug of the man out of the run, and the hint of the tip for winning, with the aid of operatic arias; and though he was in Fleetwood’s books ever since the prize-fight, neither Fleetwood nor the husband nor any skittishness of a timorous wife could stop the pursuer bent to capture the fairest and most inflaming woman of her day.

‘I prefer your stage Columelli,’ Fleetwood said.

‘I come from exile!’ said Henrietta; and her plea in excuse of ecstatics wrote her down as confessedly treasonable to the place quitted.

Ambrose Mallard entered the box, beholding only his goddess Livia.  Their eyebrows and inaudible lips conversed eloquently.  He retired like a trumped card on the appearance of M. de St. Ombre.  The courtly Frenchman won the ladies to join him in whipping the cream of the world for five minutes, and passed out before his flavour was exhausted.  Brailstone took his lesson and departed, to spy at them from other boxes and heave an inflated shirt-front.  Young Cressett, the bottle of effervescence, dashed in, and for him Livia’s face was motherly.  He rattled a tale of the highway robbery of Sir Meeson Corby on one of his Yorkshire moors.  The picture of the little baronet arose upon the narration, and it amused.  Chumley Potts came to ‘confirm every item,’ as he said.  ’Plucked Corby clean.  Pistol at his head.  Quite old style.  Time, ten P.M.  Suspects Great Britain, King, Lords and Commons, and buttons twenty times tighter.  Brosey Mallard down on him for a few fighting men.  Perfect answer to Brosey.’

‘Mr. Mallard did not mention the robbery,’ Henrietta remarked.

‘Feared to shock:  Corby such a favoured swain,’ Potts accounted for the omission.

‘Brosey spilling last night?’ Fleetwood asked.

‘At the palazzo, we were,’ said Potts.  ’Luck pretty fair first off.  Brosey did his trick, and away and away and away went he!  More old Brosey wins, the wiser he gets.  I stayed.’  He swung to Gower:  ’Don’t drink dry Sillery after two A.M.  You read me?’

‘Egyptian, but decipherable,’ said Gower.

The rising of the curtain drew his habitual groan from Potts, and he fled to collogue with the goodly number of honest fellows in the house of music who detested ‘squallery.’  Most of these afflicted pilgrims to the London conservatory were engaged upon the business of the Goddess richly inspiring the Heliconian choir, but rendering the fountain-waters heady.  Here they had to be, if they would enjoy the spectacle of London’s biggest and choicest bouquet:  and in them, too, there was an unattached air during Potts’ cooling discourse of turf and tables, except when he tossed them a morsel of tragedy, or the latest joke, not yet past the full gallop on its course.  Their sparkle was transient; woman had them fast.  Compelled to think of them as not serious members of our group, he assisted at the crush-room exit, and the happy riddance of the beautiful cousins dedicated to the merry London midnights’ further pastures.