Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/246

 'I made what I could of that little; it was better than nothing.'

Hyacinth laid his hand gently on the old man's arm; he had never felt so kindly to him, not even when he accepted the thirty pounds, before going abroad, as at this moment. 'Certainly I will come and see you.'

'I was much obliged to you for your letters,' Mr. Vetch remarked, without heeding these words, and continuing to scrape. He had always, even into the shabbiness of his old age, kept that mark of English good-breeding (which is composed of some such odd elements), that there was a shyness, an aversion to possible phrase-making, in his manner of expressing gratitude for favours, and that in spite of this cursory tone his acknowledgment had ever the accent of sincerity.

Hyacinth took but little interest in the play, which was an inanimate revival; he had been at the Théâtre Français and the tradition of that house was still sufficiently present to him to make any other style of interpretation appear of the clumsiest. He sat in one of the front stalls, close to the orchestra; and while the piece went forward—or backward, ever backward, as it seemed to him—his thoughts wandered far from the shabby scene and the dusty boards, revolving round a question which had come up immensely during the last few hours. The Princess was a capricciosa—that, at least, was Madame Grandoni's account of her; and was that blank, expressionless house in South Street a sign that an end had come to the particular caprice in which he had happened to be involved? He had returned to London with an ache of eagerness to be with her again on the same terms as at Medley, a throbbing sense that