delighted laughter. "He was such a dear about it; I said I hoped I
hadn't hurt him, and he said, 'I suppose you think, who drives hard
bargains should himself be hard.' Wasn't it pet-lamb of him?"

"I've never trodden on a pet lamb," said Lady Caroline, "so I've no
idea what its behaviour would be under the circumstances."

"Tell me," said the authoress, coming to the front of the box, the
better to survey the house, and perhaps also with a charitable
desire to make things easy for those who might pardonably wish to
survey her, "tell me, please, where is the girl sitting whom
Courtenay Youghal is engaged to?"

Elaine was pointed out to her, sitting in the fourth row of the
stalls, on the opposite side of the house to where Comus had his
seat. Once during the interval she had turned to give him a
friendly nod of recognition as he stood in one of the side
gangways, but he was absorbed at the moment in looking at himself
in the glass panel. The grave brown eyes and the mocking green-
grey ones had looked their last into each other's depths.

For Comus this first-night performance, with its brilliant
gathering of spectators, its groups and coteries of lively talkers,
even its counterfoil of dull chatterers, its pervading atmosphere
of stage and social movement, and its intruding undercurrent of
political flutter, all this composed a tragedy in which he was the
chief character. It was the life he knew and loved and basked in,
and it was the life he was leaving. It would go on reproducing
itself again and again, with its stage interest and social interest
and intruding outside interests, with the same lively chattering