Patricia watched her till she turned the corner, and then she closed the door and went slowly across the wide paved courtyard and up the little private stair, smiling to herself.
As she closed the door of the sitting-room behind her, she could not resist a prance of joy. "I'm here!" she told herself rapturously. "Oh, how glorious it is to have really started in earnest!"
She practiced her breathing exercises and tried a few three-note vocal exercises, and was delighted that her voice seemed clearer than it had ever sounded to her.
"It must be because I am so happy," she told herself. "I wish I had a lesson this afternoon. I hate to wait till the morning."
After she had sung as long as she dared, she practiced some accompaniments till her fingers tired, and then she took up a magazine and read a couple of stories, becoming so absorbed in the last one that she hardly heard a clock below striking loudly, though some sense of its strident tones made her start from her chair in dismay lest she should have missed the tea-hour.
"How stupid of me—" she began, glancing at her plain little wrist-watch. Her face fell as she looked unbelievingly at the hands pointing to three o'clock.
"It must be run down," she said, frowning and holding the watch to her ear. "No, it's going. It must be slow."
A glance at the big clock in the tower opposite her bedroom window convinced her that her watch was to be taken seriously. There was nearly an hour and a half before she might venture down into the tea-room and make such acquaintances as she could without the aid of Doris Leighton or Rosamond Merton.
"I wish I hadn't been so particular about that mending," she thought ruefully. "It was a shameful waste of time to do it at the studio. I was so particular to have everything done up to the last notch that there isn't a single letter to write, or button to sew on, or—or—anything. I simply can't sit down like a tame tabby this first exciting afternoon, when all sorts of wonderful things may be going to happen to me after while."
She sighed over the prospect of being bottled up for such an interminable period and regretted that Milano's orders were so strict in regard to her intercourse with her family.