Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 1.djvu/192

 stage, and let him know that a gentleman seated there had been watching him, at intervals, for the past half hour.

'Watching me! I like that!' said the young man. 'When I want to be watched I take you with me.'

'Of course he has looked at me,' Millicent answered, as if she had no interest in denying that. 'But you're the one he wants to get hold of.'

'To get hold of!'

'Yes, you ninny: don't hang back. He may make your fortune.'

'Well, if you would like him to come and sit by you I'll go and take a walk in the Strand,' said Hyacinth, entering into the humour of the occasion but not seeing, from where he was placed, any gentleman in the box. Millicent explained that the mysterious observer had just altered his position; he had gone into the back of the box, which had considerable depth. There were other persons in it, out of sight; she and Hyacinth were too much on the same side. One of them was a lady, concealed by the curtain; her arm, bare save for its bracelets, was visible at moments on the cushioned ledge. Hyacinth saw it, in effect, reappear there, and even while the play went on contemplated it with a certain interest; but until the curtain fell at the end of the act there was no further symptom that a gentleman wished to get hold of him.

'Now do you say it's me he's after?' Millicent asked abruptly, giving him a sidelong dig, as the fiddlers in the orchestra began to scrape their instruments for the interlude.

'Of course; I am only the pretext,' Hyacinth replied, after he had looked a moment, in a manner which he flattered himself was a proof of quick self-possession. The