Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/192

 Vetch went on, 'No doubt she is absurdly fanciful, poor dear thing; but don't, now, cast any disrespect upon it. I assure you, if she had been here alone, suffering, sinking, without a creature to tend her, and nothing before her but to die in a corner, like a starved cat, she would still have faced that fate rather than cut short by a single hour your experience of novel scenes.'

Hyacinth was silent for a moment. 'Of course I know what you mean. But she spun her delusion—she always did, all of them—out of nothing. I can't imagine what she knows about my "experience" of any kind of scenes. I told her, when I went out of town, very little more than I told you.'

'What she guessed, what she gathered, has been, at any rate, enough. She has made up her mind that you have formed a connection by means of which you will come, somehow or other, into your own. She has done nothing but talk about your grand kindred. To her mind, you know, it's all one, the aristocracy, and nothing is simpler than that the person—very exalted, as she believes—with whom you have been to stay should undertake your business with her friends.'

'Oh, well,' said Hyacinth, 'I'm very glad not to have deprived you of that entertainment.'

'I assure you the spectacle was exquisite.' Then the fiddler added, 'My dear fellow, please leave her the idea.'

'Leave it? I'll do much more!' Hyacinth exclaimed. 'I'll tell her my great relations have adopted me and that I have come back in the character of Lord Robinson.'

'She will need nothing more to die happy,' Mr. Vetch observed.