Mr. Prohack heard a sound; it might have been the creak of a floor-board or the displacement of a piece of furniture.  Startled, he looked through a half-open door into a small room.  He could see an old gilt mirror over a fire-place; and in the mirror the images of the upper portions of a young man and a young woman.  The young woman was beyond question Sissie Prohack.  The young man, he decided after a moment of hesitation—­for he could distinguish only a male overcoated back in the glass—­was Oswald Morfey.  The images were very close together.  They did not move.  Then Mr. Prohack overheard a whisper, but did not catch its purport.  Then the image of the girl’s face began to blush; it went redder and redder, and the crimson seemed to flow downwards until the exposed neck blushed also.  A marvellous and a disconcerting spectacle.  Mr. Prohack felt that he himself was blushing.  Then the two images blended, and the girl’s head and hat seemed to be agitated as by a high wind.  And then both images moved out of the field of the mirror.

The final expression on the girl’s face as it vanished was one of the most exquisite things that Mr. Prohack had ever witnessed.  It brought the tears to his eyes.  Nevertheless he was shocked.

His mind ran: 

“That fellow has kissed my daughter, and he has kissed her for the first time.  It is monstrous that any girl, and especially my daughter, should be kissed for the first time.  I have not been consulted, and I had not the slightest idea that matters had gone so far.  Her mother has probably been here, with Charlie, and gone off leaving these doves together.  Culpable carelessness on her part.  Talk about mothers!  No father would have been guilty of such negligence.  The affair must be stopped.  It amounts to an outrage.”

A peculiar person, Mr. Prohack!  No normal father could have had such thoughts.  Mr. Prohack could of course have burst in upon the pair and smashed an idyll to fragments.  But instead of doing so he turned away from the idyll and descended the stairs as stealthily as he could.

Nobody challenged his exit.  In the street he breathed with relief as if he had escaped from a house of great peril; but he did not feel safe until he had lost himself in the populousness of Oxford Street.

“For social and family purposes,” he reflected, “I have not seen that kiss.  I cannot possibly tell them, or tell anybody, that I spied upon their embrace.  To put myself right I ought to have called out a greeting the very instant I spotted them.  But I did not call out a greeting.  By failing to do so I put myself in a false position....  How shall I get official news of that kiss?  Shall I ever get news of it?”