ale said--with an Englishman's exasperating pride in his own
stupidity wherever a matter of art is concerned--that he couldn't make
head or tail of the performance. The principal disappointment, he was
good enough to add, was mine, for I evidently understood foreign music,
and enjoyed it. Ladies generally did. His darling little Neelie--

"I was in no humor to be persecuted with his 'Darling Neelie' after
what I had gone through at the theater. It might have been the irritated
state of my nerves, or it might have been the eau-de-cologne flying to
my head, but the bare mention of the girl seemed to set me in a flame. I
tried to turn Armadale's attention in the direction of the supper-table.
He was much obliged, but he had no appetite for more. I offered him wine
next, the wine of the country, which is all that our poverty allows us
to place on the table. He was much obliged again. The foreign wine was
very little more to his taste than the foreign music; but he would
take some because I asked him; and he would drink my health in the
old-fashioned way, with his best wishes for the happy time when we
should all meet again at Thorpe Ambrose, and when there would be a
mistress to welcome me at the great house.

"Was he mad to persist in this way? No; his face answered for him.
He was under the impression that he was making himself particularly
agreeable to me.

"I looked at Midwinter. He might have seen some reason for interfering
to change the conversation, if he had looked at me in return. But he
sat silent in his chair, irritable and overworked, with his eyes on the
ground, thinking.

"I got up and went to the window. Still impenetrable to a sense of his
own clumsiness, Armadale followed me. If I had been strong enough to
toss him out of the window into the sea, I should certainly have done it
at that moment. Not being strong enough, I looked steadily at the view
over the bay, and gave him a hint, the broadest and rudest I could think
of, to go.

"'A lovely night for a walk,' I said, 'if you are tempted to walk back
to the hotel.'

"I doubt if he heard me. At any rate, I produced no sort of effect on
him. He stood staring sentimentally at the moonlight; and--there is
really no other word to express it--_blew_ a sigh. I felt a presentiment
of what was coming, unless I stopped his mouth by speaking first.

"'With all your fondness for England,' I said, 'you must own that we
have no such moonlight as that at home.'