Lionel looked round for Fairthorn, who now emerged ab anqulo from his nook.
“Oh, Mr. Fairthorn, how you have enchanted me! I never believed the flute could have been capable of such effects!”
Mr. Fairthorn’s grotesque face lighted up. He took off his spectacles, as if the better to contemplate the face of his eulogist. “So you were pleased! really?” he said, chuckling a strange, grim chuckle, deep in his inmost self.
“Pleased! it is a cold word! Who would not be more than pleased?”
“You should hear me in the open air.”
“Let me do so-to-morrow.”
“My dear young sir, with all my heart. Hist!”—gazing round as if haunted,—“I like you. I wish him to like you. Answer all his questions as if you did not care how he turned you inside out. Never ask him a question, as if you sought to know what he did not himself confide. So there is some thing, you think, in a flute, after all? There are people who prefer the fiddle.”
“Then they never heard your flute, Mr. Fairthorn.” The musician again emitted his discordant chuckle, and, nodding his head nervously and cordially, shambled away without lighting a candle, and was engulfed in the shadows of some mysterious corner.