"What!" Mrs. Lennox cried, with amazement. "I thought you met him at Ravenel! I understood he heard you sing there, and it was because of it that he wanted to send you abroad to study."
"If it be Mr. van Rensselaer who has been so kind to me, I do not know it," Katrine answered, in no small degree annoyed by this enforced intimacy. "I have never seen him nor heard his name before in my life."
If Mrs. Lennox noted Katrine's manner she
was in nowise deterred by it from going deeper into the subject.
"Mrs. Ravenel told me," she continued, with excitement in her voice, "that Nick van Rensselaer came to her at Bar Harbor, and asked the use of her name if he furnished the means to send you abroad to study. He said that he was especially anxious to remain unknown in the matter. Mrs. Ravenel told me afterward that you had declined the offer because of having inherited a fortune yourself. But, of course, I thought you must have met him; in fact, I remember that Frank said he thought so, too. By-the-way," she went on, rising to go, "he is coming over soon; Mr. Ravenel, I mean." She looked conscious for a second, as though preferring to keep something back, and then finished: "He will, of course, call while he is here?"
"He may be so kind," Katrine answered, suavely.
"Good-bye," Mrs. Lennox said, holding out a slim, black-gloved hand first to the Countess and then to Katrine. "I hope your studies will let you come to me soon. I hear you are to make your début in the spring."
Katrine laughed. "That will be as Josef says."
"
Good-bye again."