“The old story. Your lover forsook you?”
“No, my lover died.”
There was a quick glance of sympathy, and a few moments’ pause. Then Madame Kominski resumed: “Your story is very sad. But I am afraid that for that very reason I cannot entertain the idea of making you my companion. I want some one who will be cheerful and bright, not a woman whose bearing will wear the impress of a tragic past. Pray do not think me unfeeling, but I often have to leave my little daughter for days together, and would not like her to be made melancholy.”
“You would find me as cheerful as you could desire. I intend to cast my past from my mind as much as possible.”
“If I could think that—”
But there is no need to give the whole conversation in detail. Suffice it to say that I prevailed upon Madame Kominski to write to Mr. Garth for further particulars of me, and that I obtained her promise to engage me, should his reply prove satisfactory. Feeling quite sure that this would be the case, and that Madame Kominski was a woman who could be trusted, I told her that my real name was Courtney, but that I preferred to be called Miss Saxon for the future, as I did not wish it to be known that I had left home to go to service. As it happened, it was well that I took my prospective employer into my confidence. She had heard something about my history from the newspapers, and my candor seemed to win both her sympathy and her good-will.
She insisted upon my having lunch with her, and introduced me to her daughter Feodorowna, a girl of ten, who could not boast of a much more attractive appearance than myself. But by-and-by, as she grew to womanhood, her looks might improve, and she might possibly become more like her mother, who certainly was a very beautiful woman, being tall, stately, and inclined to embonpoint, though as yet being only sufficiently stout to make her voluptuously perfect. Her fine dark eyes, Grecian features, clear skin and purple-black hair, which waved and curled about her brows in charming disorder, would seem to disclaim a Mongolian origin altogether, and were all in harmony with her musical voice and graceful gait.
Two days later, a very satisfactory reply to madame’s letter having come from Mr. Garth, all arrangements were completed. My luggage had been sent for, and I was formally installed as companion-governess in the household of Madame Kominski, who readily agreed to my wish that my true appellative should be discarded for the present, and that I should be introduced and known to others only as Miss Saxon. I had not forgotten May Morris’s idea that absence of good looks was the best recommendation to madame’s favor. But I did not let the notion worry me. I was by this time convinced that nature, when denying me beauty, had given me some compensating qualifications, and Madame Kominski was so kind and friendly with me that I found no difficulty in being comparatively happy and wholly cheerful.
Feodorowna, or Feo, as she was called by her mother, seemed to have taken quite a fancy to me, and I won her heart altogether when I proposed teaching her to play the violin. I found her to be an apt and docile pupil, but as masters came to the house to teach her many of the branches of her education, such portion of it as fell on my shoulders did not prove onerous.
“We start for St. Petersburg on Monday,” said Madame Kominski, the Friday after I had become a member of her household, looking up from a letter which she was reading. “I suppose you have no objection to go there, Miss Saxon?”