een laughing, too; laughing in my
old fashion; not in Mrs. Zephine's little rippling way, but with the
thorough-paced, unconventional violence with which I used to reward the
homely sallies of Bobby and the Brat. I am laughing still, though the
curtain has fallen between the acts, and the orchestra are fiddling
gayly away, and the turned-up gas making everybody look pale. My
opera-glasses are in my hand, and I am turning them slowly round the
house, making out acquaintances in the stalls, prying into the secrets
of the boxes, examining the well-known features of my future king.

Suddenly my smile dies away, and the glasses drop from my trembling
hands into my lap. Who is it that has just entered, and is slipping
across the intervening people in the stalls to his own seat, one of the
few that have hitherto remained vacant beneath us? Can I help
recognizing the close-shorn, cameo-like beauty--to me _no_ beauty; to me
deformity and ugliness--of the dark face that for months I daily saw by
my fireside? Can there be _two_ Musgraves? No! it is _he_! yes, _he_!
though now there is on his features none of the baffled passion, none of
the wrathful malignity, which they always wear in my memory, as they
wore in the February dusk of Brindley Wood. Now, in their handsome
serenity, they wear only the look of subdued sadness that a male Briton
always assumes when he takes his pleasure. Do you remember what
Goldsmith says?--"When I see an Englishman laugh, I fancy I rather see
him hunting after joy than having caught it."

As soon as my eyes have fallen upon, and certainly recognized him, by a
double impulse I draw back behind the curtain of the box, and look at
Roger. He, too, has seen him; I can tell it in an instant by his face,
and by the expression of his eyes, as they meet mine. I try to look back
unflinchingly, indifferently, at him. I would give ten years of my life
for an unmoved complexion, but it is no use. Struggle as I will against
it, I feel that rush, that torrent of vivid scarlet, that, retiring,
leaves me as white as my gown. Oh! it _is_ hard, is not it, that the
lying changefulness of a deceitful skin should have power to work me
such hurt?

"Are you faint?" Roger asks, bending toward me, and speaking in a low
and icy voice; "shall I get you a glass of water?"

"No, thank you!" I reply, resolutely, and with no hesitation or stammer
in my tone, "I am not at all faint."

But, alas! my words cannot undo what my fal