“Your giraffe is rather handsome,” she said, behind her fan.

“I believe she is considered to be one of the best-looking women in England,” said he, somewhat stiffly.

“Oh, really!  Well, of course, tastes differ,” Miss Grace Mainwaring said.  “I don’t think a woman should have blacking-brushes instead of eyebrows.  But it’s a matter of taste.”

“Yes,” said he, “and comic opera is the sort of place where one’s taste becomes so refined.  What do you think of this gag now?  Is this what the public like—­when they come to hear music?”

“You’re very fastidious—­you want everything to be super-fine—­but you may depend on it that it keeps the piece going with the pit and gallery.”

His answer to that was one of this young lady’s strangest experiences of the stage:  Lionel Moore had suddenly left her, and, indeed, quitted this scene, in which he was supposed to be a chief figure.  He walked down the wings until he found himself close to Miss Honnor Cunyngham.

“Miss Cunyngham,” he said.

She turned—­her eyes somewhat bewildered by the glare of light on the stage.

“Come back, please,” he said.  “I don’t want you to see this scene—­it has nothing to do with the operetta—­and it is dull and stupid and tedious beyond description.”

She followed him two or three steps, wondering.

“You say you like the music,” he continued, here in the twilight of the wings, “and the little story is really rather pretty and idyllic; but they will go and introduce a lot of music-hall stuff to please the groundlings.  I should prefer you not to see it.  Won’t you rather wait a little, and talk about something?—­it isn’t often you and I meet.  Did you get many salmon after I left Strathaivron?”

“Oh, no,” said she, still rather surprised.  “Towards the end of the season the red fish are really not worth landing.”

“It seems a long time since then,” he said.  “I find myself sitting up at night and thinking over all those experiences—­making pictures of them—­and the hours go by in a most astonishing fashion.  Here in London, among the November fogs, it seems so strange to think of those splendid days and the long, clear twilights.  I suppose it is all so well known to you, you do not trouble to recall it; but I do—­it is like a dream—­only that I see everything so distinctly—­I seem almost to be able to touch each leaf of the bushes in the little dell where we used to have luncheon; do you remember?”

“Above the Geinig Pool?—­oh, yes!” she said, smiling.

“And the Junction Pool,” he continued, with a curious eagerness, as if he were claiming her sympathy, her interest, on account of that old companionship—­“I can make the clearest vision of it as I sit up all by myself at night—­you remember the little bush on the opposite side that you used sometimes to catch your fly on, and the shelf of shingle going suddenly down into the brown water—­I always