"I have heard from Hester," Miss Roberta interposed timidly, "that the orchard house has been bought by an Oxford professor—it sounds most respectable, does it not, sister?"
Miss La Sarthe looked stern:
"More than thirty-five years ago, Roberta, I told you I disapproved of Hester's chattering. I cannot conceive personally, how you can converse with servants as you do. Hester would not have dared to gossip to me!"
Poor Miss Roberta looked crushed. She had often been chided on this point before.
Halcyone would like to have reminded her elder aunt that William, who was equally a servant, had announced some such news to her that afternoon; but she remained silent. She must gain her point if she could, and to argue, she knew, was never a road to success.
"I am sure if we could get a really nice English girl," hazarded Miss Roberta, wishing to propitiate, "it might be company for us all, Ginevra—but if Mrs. Anderton insists upon sending another foreign person—"
"And of course she will," interrupted the elder lady; "people of Mrs. Anderton's class always think it is more genteel to have a smattering of foreign languages than to know their own mother tongue. We may get another German—and that I could hardly bear."
"Then do write to my stepfather, please, please," cried Halcyone. "Say I am going to be splendidly taught—lots of interesting things—and oh—I will try so hard by myself to keep up what I already know. I will practice—really, really, Aunt Ginevra—and do my German exercises and dear Aunt Roberta can talk French to me and even teach me the Italian songs that she sings so beautifully to her guitar!"
This last won the day as far as Miss Roberta was concerned. Her faded cheeks flushed pink. The trilling Italian love-songs, learnt some fifty years ago during a two years' residence in Florence, had always been her pride and joy. So she warmly seconded her niece's pleadings, and the momentous decision was come to that James Anderton should be approached upon the subject. If the child learned Greek—from a professor—and could pick up a few of Roberta's songs as an accomplishment, she might do well enough—and a governess in the house, in spite of the money paid by Mr. Anderton to keep her, was a continual gall and worry to them.
Halcyone knew very little about her stepfather. She was aware that he had married her mother when she was a very poor and sorrowful young widow, that she had had two stepsisters and a brother very close together, and then that the pretty mother had died. There was evidently something so sad connected with the whole story that Priscilla never cared much to talk about it. It was always, "your poor sainted mother in heaven," or, "your blessed pretty mother"—and with that instinctive knowledge of the feelings of other people which characterized Halcyone's point of view, she had avoided questioning her old nurse. Her stepfather, James Anderton, was a very wealthy stockbroker—she knew that, and also that a year or so after her mother's death he had married again—"a person of his own class," Miss La Sarthe had said, "far more suitable to him than poor Elaine."