“Miss Wedderburn, will you try to compose yourself, and listen to something I have to say?”
I looked up. I saw his eyes fixed seriously and kindly upon me with an expression quite apart from their usual indifferent coolness—with the look of one friend to another—with such a look as I had seen and have since seen exchanged between Courvoisier and his friend Helfen.
“See,” said he, “I take an interest in you, Fräulein May. Why should I hesitate to say so? You are young—you do not know the extent of your own strength, or of your own weakness. I do. I will not flatter—it is not my way—as I think you know.”
I smiled. I remembered the plentiful blame and the scant praise which it had often fallen to my lot to receive from him.
“I am a strict, sarcastic, disagreeable old pedagogue, as you and so many of my other fair pupils consider,” he went on, and I looked up in amaze. I knew that so many of his “fair pupils” considered him exactly the reverse.
“It is my business to know whether a voice is good for anything or not. Now yours, with training, will be good for a great deal. Have you the means, or the chance, or the possibility of getting that training in England?”
“No.”
“I should like to help you, partly from the regard I have for you, partly for my own sake, because I think you would do me credit.”
He paused. I was looking at him with all my senses concentrated upon what he had said. He had been talking round the subject until he saw that he had fairly fixed my attention; then he said, sharply and rapidly: