It was delightful to hug to herself the secret assurance that Signor Lombardi thought she might "do anything" with her voice. The vagueness of the prophecy did not detract from its value. It rather enhanced it, by giving wider scope to the imagination.
But when on the following week, she again presented herself for a lesson, there was nothing in the signor's manner to suggest that he so highly esteemed her musical gift. He found little to praise and much to condemn in her performance, and it was with a sigh suggestive of weary relief that he finally dismissed her.
Juliet would have felt out of heart but for her remembrance of what Algernon Chalcombe had told her. To her surprise, she again encountered that young man at the railway station. It now appeared that he had an engagement which brought him into town on this day every week, and would involve his travelling home by the same train as Juliet.
Juliet hardly knew whether she were glad or sorry. She was nervous lest anyone of her acquaintance should see her as she sat talking with Algernon Chalcombe. She experienced many a throb of uneasiness, as she thought how her mother would feel if she saw them thus together. Yet Algernon made his company so agreeable to her, that she could not regret having met him. He talked to her again of her voice, and was able to recall various other laudatory remarks Signor Lombardi had made concerning it when talking to him in confidence. And Juliet's vanity drank eagerly of the cup of nectar thus presented to it.
After this, Algernon Chalcombe never failed to meet Juliet on her return from Kensington. Juliet's conscience was uneasy under what seemed so much like a clandestine arrangement. She had never concealed anything from her mother before, and she had burning sense of compunction and shame, when her mother, in her gentle, loving way, questioned her as her journey to and from the West End.
Yet she had no difficulty in defending her conduct to herself: She could not help meeting him. Her mother had never told her not to speak to him. She knew that she had seen Flossie's brother on the day she went to their house. She could not help greeting him, if she saw him. It was impossible to be rude to people.
And since he was travelling by the same train, what harm could there be in their sitting together of exchanging a few words as they went along? Of course, the prudish minds of Hannah and Salome would be shocked; but she did not care what they thought.
But, though she professed to herself not to care, it is certain that Juliet was in the habit of looking anxiously for her sisters' forms on each suburban platform at which the train stopped, and that she experienced relief at not seeing them.
One day her conscience so troubled her, that she purposely lingered on her way to the station, that she might miss the train by which Algernon Chalcombe was in the habit of travelling. But when she came on to the platform, ten minutes after the train had started, Algernon still stood there. He came up to her with the air of one who is sure of his welcome.
"How did you manage to miss your train?" he asked.