By this time Lionel Moore, who was responsible for these strangers being in the theatre, had gone quickly off to his own dressing-room to change his attire, so that when the two ladies reached a certain half-open door where the prima-donna’s maid was waiting for her, Lord Rockminster naturally hung back and would have remained without.  Miss Burgoyne instantly turned to him.

“Oh, but you may come in too!” she said, with great complaisance.

Somewhat timorously he followed these two into a prettily furnished little sitting-room, where he was bidden to take a seat and regale himself with lemonade, if he was so minded; and then Miss Burgoyne drew aside the curtain of an inner apartment, and said to her other guest: 

“You may come in here, if you like.  Mr. Moore said you wished to know about stage make-up and that kind of thing—­I will show you all the dreadful secrets—­Jane!” Thereupon these three disappeared behind the curtain, and Lord Rockminster was left alone.

But Lord Rockminster liked being left alone.  He was a great thinker, who rarely revealed his thoughts, but who was quite happy in possessing them.  He could sit for an hour at a club-window, calmly gazing out into the street, and be perfectly content.  It is true that the pale tobacco-tinge that overspread the young man’s fair complexion seemed to speak of an out-of-door life; but he had long ago emancipated himself from the tyranny of field-sports.  That thraldom had begun early with him, as with most of his class.  He had hardly been out of his Eton jacket when gillies and water-bailiffs got hold of him, and made him thrash salmon-pools with a seventeen-foot rod until his back was breaking; and then keepers and foresters had taken possession of him, and compelled him to crawl for miles up wet gullies and across peat-hags, and then put a rifle in his hand, expecting him to hit a bewildering object on the other side of a corrie when, as a matter of fact, his heart was like to burst with excitement and fear.  But the young man had some strength of character.  He rebelled; he refused to be driven like a slave any longer; he struck for freedom and won it.  There was still much travelling to be encountered; but when he had got that over, when he had seen everything and done everything, and there was nothing more to do or to see, then he became master of himself and conducted himself accordingly.  Contemplation, accompanied by a cigarette, was now his chief good.  What his meditations were no one knew, but they sufficed unto himself.  He had attained Nirvana.  He lived in a region of perpetual thought.