Then Lady Greville played her trump card.
'Look, Anton,' she said, 'you see that violin. I have no need, I see, to tell you its value. If you will come with me and make no scene, you shall have it for your very own. Ninette will be perfectly happy. Do you agree?'
I looked at my old fiddle, lying on the floor. How yellow and trashy it looked beside the grand old Cremona, bedded in its blue velvet.
'I will do what you like, Madame,' I said.
'Human nature is pretty much the same in geniuses and dullards,' said
Felix. 'I congratulate you, Auntie.'
And so the bargain was struck, and the new life entered upon that very day. Lady Greville sought out Ninette at once, though I was not allowed to accompany her.
I never saw Ninette again. She made no opposition to Lady Greville's scheme. She let herself be taken to the Orphanage, and she never asked, so they said, to see me again.
'She's a stupid little thing,' said Lady Greville to her nephew, on her return, 'and as plain as possible; but I suppose she was kind to the boy. They will forget each other now I hope. It is not as if they were related.'
'In that case they would already be hating each other. However, I am quite sure your protégé will forget soon enough; and, after all, you have nothing to do with the girl.'
I suppose I did not think very much of Ninette then; but what would you have? It was such a change from the old vagrant days, that there is a good deal to excuse me. I was absorbed too in the new and wonderful symmetry which music began to assume, as taught me by the master Lady Greville procured for me. When the news was broken to me, with great gentleness, that my little companion had run away from the sisters with whom she had been placed—run away, and left no traces behind her, I hardly realised how completely she would have passed away from me. I thought of her for a little while with some regret; then I remembered Stradivarius, and I could not be sorry long. So by degrees I ceased to think of her.