Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/118

 perceived that it must be something important, for the stranger was not a man who would take an interest in anything else. Hyacinth was immensely struck with him—he could see that he was remarkable and felt slightly aggrieved that he should be a stranger: that is, that he should be, apparently, a familiar of Lisson Grove and yet that M. Poupin should not have thought his young friend from Lomax Place worthy, up to this time, to be made acquainted with him. I know not to what degree the visitor in the other chair discovered these reflections in Hyacinth's face, but after a moment, looking across at him, he said in a friendly yet just slightly diffident way, a way our hero liked, 'And do you know, too?'

'Do I know what?' asked Hyacinth, wondering.

'Oh, if you did, you would!' the young man exclaimed, laughing again. Such a rejoinder, from any one else, would have irritated our sensitive hero, but it only made Hyacinth more curious about his interlocutor, whose laugh was loud and extraordinarily gay.

'Mon ami, you ought to present ces messieurs,' Madame Poupin remarked.

'Ah ça, is that the way you trifle with state secrets?' her husband cried out, without heeding her. Then he went on, in a different tone: 'M. Hyacinthe is a gifted child, un enfant très-doué, in whom I take a tender interest—a child who has an account to settle. Oh, a thumping big one! Isn't it so, mon petit?'

This was very well meant, but it made Hyacinth blush, and, without knowing exactly what to say, he murmured shyly, 'Oh, I only want them to let me alone!'

'He is very young,' said Eustache Poupin.