“Why do you want to poke your head into ugly black holes?” Muniment asked, laying his hand on Hyacinth’s shoulder and shaking it gently.
“Don’t you belong to the party of action?” our young man gravely demanded.
“Look at the way he has picked up all the silly bits of catchwords!” Paul cried in not unkindly derision to his sister. “You must have got that precious phrase out of the newspapers, out of some drivelling leader. Is that the party you want to belong to?” he went on with his clear eyes ranging over his diminutive friend.
“If you’ll show me the thing itself I shall have no more occasion to mind the newspapers,” Hyacinth candidly pleaded, rejoicing all the while to feel himself in such a relation. It was his view of himself, and not an unfair one, that his was a character that would never sue for a favour; but now he felt that in any connexion with Paul Muniment such a law would be suspended. This rare man he could go on his knees to without a sense of humiliation.
“What thing do you mean, infatuated, deluded youth?” Paul pursued, refusing to be serious.
“Well, you know you do go to places you had far better keep out of, and that often when I lie here and listen to steps on the stairs I’m sure they are coming in to make a search for your papers,” Miss Muniment lucidly interposed.
“The day they find my papers, my dear, will be the day you’ll get up and dance.”
“What did you ask me to come home with you for?” Hyacinth demanded as he twirled his hat. It was an effort for a moment to keep the tears from his eyes; he saw himself forced to put such a different construction on his new friend’s hospitality. He had had a happy impression that Muniment had divined in him a possible associate of a high type in a subterranean crusade against the existing order of things, whereas it now came over him that the real use he had been put to was to beguile an hour for a pert invalid. That was all very well, and he would sit by Miss Rosy’s bedside, were it a part of his service, every day in the week; only in such a case it should be his reward to enjoy the confidence of her brother. This young man justified at the present juncture the high estimate Lady Aurora Langrish had formed of his intelligence: whatever his natural reply to Hyacinth’s question would have been he invented straight off a better one and said at random, smiling and not knowing exactly what his visitor had meant:
“What did I ask you to come with me for? To see if you’d be afraid.”
What there was to be afraid of was to Hyacinth a quantity equally vague; but he answered quickly enough: “I think you’ve only to try me to see.”