And he smiled indulgently. "To bee-gin with, you will put away all your
songs--every one. There will be nothing but exercises for months yet.
And you will come for your first lesson on Thursday. Mondays and
Thursdays I will teach you, but you must come other days, also, and
listen at my lessons. There is much--very much--learned by listening, if
one listens with the brain as well as with the ear. Now, little
singing-bird, good-bye. I will go with you myself to the door."

The whole thing seemed too impossibly good to be true. Diana felt as if
she were in the middle of a beautiful dream from which she might at any
moment waken to the disappointing reality of things. Hardly able to
believe the evidence of her senses, she found herself once again in the
narrow hall, shepherded by the maestro's portly form. As he held the
door open for her to pass out into the street, some one ran quickly up
the steps, pausing on the topmost.

"Ha, Olga!" exclaimed Baroni, beaming. "You haf returned just too late
to hear Mees Quentin. But you will play for her--many times yet." Then,
turning to Diana, he added by way of introduction: "This is my
accompanist, Mees Lermontof."

Diana received the impression of a thin, satirical face, its unusual
pallor picked out by the black brows and hair, of a bitter-looking mouth
that hardly troubled itself to smile in salutation, and, above all, of a
pair of queer green eyes, which, as the heavy, opaque white lids above
them lifted, seemed slowly--and rather contemptuously--to take her in
from head to foot.

She bowed, and as Miss Lermontof inclined her head slightly in response,
there was a kind of cold aloofness in her bearing--a something defiantly