"That will bring her," thought Tante, sealing the missive, in her old-fashioned way, with wax.
She was right; Miss Vanhorn came.
Anne sang first alone. Then with Helen.
"Isn't that Mrs. Lorrington?" said a voice behind Miss Vanhorn.
"Yes. My Louise tells me that she has taken up this Miss Douglas enthusiastically—comes here to sing with her almost every day."
"Who is the girl?"
Miss Vanhorn prepared an especially rigid expression of countenance for the item of relationship which she supposed would follow. But nothing came; Helen was evidently waiting for a more dramatic occasion. She felt herself respited; yet doubly angry and apprehensive.
When the song was ended, there was much applause of the subdued drawing-room kind—applause, however, plainly intended for Helen alone. Singularly enough, Miss Vanhorn resented this. "If I should take Anne, dress her properly, and introduce her as my niece, the Lorrington would be nowhere," she thought, angrily. It was the first germ of the idea.
It was not allowed to disappear. It grew and gathered strength slowly, as Tante and Helen intended it should; the two friendly conspirators never relaxed for a day their efforts concerning it. Anne remained unconscious of these manœuvres; but the old grandaunt was annoyed, and urged, and flattered, and menaced forward with so much skill that it ended in her proposing to Anne, one day in the early spring, that she should come and spend the summer with her, the children on the island to be provided for meanwhile by an allowance, and Anne herself to have a second winter at the Moreau school, if she wished it, so that she might be fitted for a higher position than otherwise she could have hoped to attain.
"Oh, grandaunt!" cried the girl, taking the old loosely gloved hand in hers.