I almost gasped. Miss Hallam, who had been a by-word in Skernford, and in our own family, for eccentricity and stinginess, was indeed heaping coals of fire upon my head. I tried, weakly and ineffectually, to express my gratitude to her, and at last said:
“You may trust me never to abuse your kindness, Miss Hallam.”
“I have trusted you ever since you refused Sir Peter Le Marchant, and were ready to leave your home to get rid of him,” said she, with grim humor.
She then told me that she had settled everything with von Francius, even that I was to remove to different lodgings, more suited for a solitary student than Frau Steinmann’s busy house.
“And,” she added, “I shall ask Doctor Mittendorf to have an eye to you now and then, and to write to me of how you go on.”
I could not find many words in which to thank her. The feeling that I was not going, did not need to leave it all, filled my heart with a happiness as deep as it was unfounded and unreasonable.
At my next lesson von Francius spoke to me of the future.
“I want you to be a real student—no play one,” said he, “or you will never succeed. And for that reason I told Miss Hallam that you had better leave this house. There are too many distractions. I am going to put you in a very different place.”
“Where? In which part of the town?”
“Wehrhahn, 39, is the address,” said he.