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.