"I was twelve on the seventh of last October, Aunt Ginevra."

"Twelve--a young gentlewoman's education is not complete at twelve years old, child--although governesses in the house are not very pleasant, I admit"--and Miss La Sarthe sighed.

"Oh, I know it isn't!" said Halcyone, "but you see, I can speak French and German quite decently, and the other things surely I might learn myself in between the old gentleman's teaching."

"But what do you know of this--this stranger?" demanded Miss La Sarthe.

"You allude to someone of whom neither your Aunt Roberta nor I have ever heard."

"I met him to-day. I went into the orchard as usual, and found the house was inhabited, and I saw him and he asked me in to tea. He is a very old gentleman with a long white beard, and very, very clever. His room is full of Greek books and we had a long talk, and he was very kind and said he would teach me to read them."

This seemed to Halcyone to be sufficient in the way of credentials for anyone.

"I have heard from Hester," Miss Roberta interposed timidly, "that the orchard house has been bought by an Oxford professor--it sounds most respectable, does it not, sister?"

Miss La Sarthe looked stern:

"More than thirty-five years ago, Roberta, I told you I disapproved of Hester's chattering. I cannot conceive personally, how you can converse with servants as you do. Hester would not have dared to gossip to me!"

Poor Miss Roberta looked crushed. She had often been chided on this point before.

Halcyone would like to have reminded her elder aunt that William, who was equally a servant, had announced some such news to her that afternoon; but she remained silent. She must gain her point if she could, and to argue, she knew, was never a road to success.

"I am sure if we could get a really nice English girl," hazarded Miss Roberta, wishing to propitiate, "it might be company for us all, Ginevra--but if Mrs. Anderton insists upon sending another foreign person--"

"And of course she will," interrupted the elder lady; "people of Mrs.

Anderton's cla.s.s always think it is more genteel to have a smattering of foreign languages than to know their own mother tongue. We may get another German--and that I could hardly bear."

"Then do write to my stepfather, please, please," cried Halcyone. "Say I am going to be splendidly taught--lots of interesting things--and oh--I will try so hard by myself to keep up what I already know. I will practice--really, really, Aunt Ginevra--and do my German exercises and dear Aunt Roberta can talk French to me and even teach me the Italian songs that she sings so beautifully to her guitar!"

This last won the day as far as Miss Roberta was concerned. Her faded cheeks flushed pink. The trilling Italian love-songs, learnt some fifty years ago during a two years' residence in Florence, had always been her pride and joy. So she warmly seconded her niece's pleadings, and the momentous decision was come to that James Anderton should be approached upon the subject. If the child learned Greek--from a professor--and could pick up a few of Roberta's songs as an accomplishment, she might do well enough--and a governess in the house, in spite of the money paid by Mr. Anderton to keep her, was a continual gall and worry to them.

Halcyone knew very little about her stepfather. She was aware that he had married her mother when she was a very poor and sorrowful young widow, that she had had two stepsisters and a brother very close together, and then that the pretty mother had died. There was evidently something so sad connected with the whole story that Priscilla never cared much to talk about it. It was always, "your poor sainted mother in heaven," or, "your blessed pretty mother"--and with that instinctive knowledge of the feelings of other people which characterized Halcyone's point of view, she had avoided questioning her old nurse. Her stepfather, James Anderton, was a very wealthy stockbroker--she knew that, and also that a year or so after her mother's death he had married again--"a person of his own cla.s.s," Miss La Sarthe had said, "far more suitable to him than poor Elaine."

Halcyone had only been six years old at her mother's death, but she kept a crisp memory of the horror of it. The crimson, crumpled-looking baby brother, in his long clothes, whose coming somehow seemed responsible for the loss of her tender angel, for a long time was viewed with resentful hatred. It was a terrible, unspeakable grief. She remembered perfectly the helpless sense of loss and loneliness.

Her mother had loved her with pa.s.sionate devotion. She was conscious even then that Mabel and Ethel, the stepsisters, were as nothing in comparison to herself in her mother's regard. She had a certainty that her mother had loved her own father very much--the young, brilliant, spendthrift, last La Sarthe. And her mother had been of the family, too--a distant cousin. So she herself was La Sarthe to her finger tips--slender and pale and distinguished-looking. She remembered the last scene with her stepfather before her coming to La Sarthe Chase. It was the culmination after a year of misery and una.s.suaged grieving for her loss. He had come into the nursery where the three little girls were playing--Halcyone and her two stepsisters--and he had made them all stand up in his rough way, and see who could catch the pennies the best that he threw from the door. His brother, "Uncle Ted," was with him. And the two younger children, Mabel of five and Ethel of four, shouted riotously with glee and s.n.a.t.c.hed the coins from one another and greedily quarreled over those which Halcyone caught with her superior skill and handed to them.

She remembered her stepfather's face--it grew heavy and sullen and he walked to the window, where his brother followed him--and she remembered their words and had pondered over them often since.

"It's the d.a.m.ned breeding in the brat that fairly gets me raw, Ted," Mr.

Anderton had said. "Why the devil couldn't Elaine have given it to my children, too. I can't stand it--a home must be found for her elsewhere."

And soon after that, Halcyone had come with her own Priscilla to La Sarthe Chase to her great-aunts Ginevra and Roberta, in their tumble-down mansion which her father had not lived to inherit. Under family arrangements, it was the two old ladies' property for their lives.

And now the problem of what James Anderton--or rather the second Mrs.

James Anderton--would do was the question of the moment. Would there be a fresh governess or would they all be left in peace without one? Mrs.

James Anderton, Miss Roberta had said once, was a person who "did her duty," as people often did "in her cla.s.s"--"a most worthy woman, if not quite a lady"--and she had striven to do her best by James Anderton's children--even his stepchild Halcyone.

Miss La Sarthe promised to write that night before she went to bed--but Halcyone knew it was a long process with her and that an answer could not be expected for at least a week. Therefore there was no good agitating herself too soon about the result. It was one of her principles never to worry over unnecessary things. Life was full of blessed certainties to enjoy without spoiling them by speculating over possible unpleasantnesses.

The old gentleman--Cheiron--and old William and the timid curate who came to dine on Sat.u.r.day nights once a month were about the only male creatures Halcyone had ever spoken to within her recollection--their rector was a confirmed invalid and lived abroad--but Priscilla had a supreme contempt for them as a s.e.x.

"One and all set on themselves, my lamb," she said; "even your own beautiful father had to be bowed down to and worshiped. We put up with it in him, of course; but I never did see one that didn't think of himself first. It is their selfishness that causes all the sorrow of the world to women. We needn't have lost your angel mother but for Mr.

Anderton's selfishness--a kind, hard, rough man--but as selfish as a gentleman."

It seemed a more excusable defect to Priscilla in the upper cla.s.s, but had no redeeming touch in the status of Mr. Anderton.

Halcyone, however, had a logical mind and reasoned with her nurse:

"If they are _all_ selfish, Priscilla, it must be either women's fault for letting them be, or G.o.d intended them to be so. A thing can't be _all_ unless the big force makes it."

This "big force"--this "G.o.d" was a real personality to Halcyone. She could not bear it when in church she heard the meanest acts of revenge and petty wounded vanity attributed to Him. She argued it was because the curate did not know. Having come from a town, he could not be speaking of the same wonderful G.o.d she knew in the woods and fields--the G.o.d so loving and tender in the springtime to the budding flowers, so gorgeous in the summer and autumn and so pure and cold in the winter.

With all that to attend to He could not possibly stoop to punish ignorant people and harbor anger and wrath against them. He was the sunlight and the moonlight and the starlight. He was the voice which talked in the night and made her never lonely.

And all the other things of nature and the universe were G.o.ds, also--lesser ones obeying the supreme force and somehow fused with Him in a whole, being part of a scheme which He had invented to complete the felicity of the world He had created--not beings to be prayed to or solicited for favors, but just gentle, glorious, sympathetic, invisible friends. She was very much interested in Christ; He was certainly a part of G.o.d, too--but she could not understand about His dying to save the world, since the G.o.d she heard of in the church was still forever punishing and torturing human beings, or only extending mercy after His vanity had been flattered by offerings and sacrifices.

"I expect," she said to herself, coming home one Sunday after one of Mr.

Miller's lengthy discourses upon G.o.d's vengeance, "when I am older and able really to understand what is written in the Bible I shall find it isn't that a bit, and it is either Mr. Miller can't see straight or he has put the stops all in the wrong places and changed the sense. In any case I shall not trouble now--the G.o.d who kept me from falling through the hole in the loft yesterday by that ray of sunlight to show the cracked board, is the one I am fond of."

It was the simple and logical view of a case which always appealed to her.

"Halcyone" her parents had called her well--their bond of love--their tangible proof of halcyon days. And always when Halcyone read her "Heroes" she felt it was her beautiful father and mother who were the real Halcyone and Ceyx, and she longed to see the blue summer sea and the pleasant isles of Greece that she might find their floating nest and see them sail away happily for ever over those gentle southern waves.

CHAPTER III

Mr. Carlyon--for such was Cheiron's real name--knocked the ashes from his long pipe next day at eleven o'clock in the morning, after his late breakfast and began to arrange his books. His mind was away in a land of cla.s.sical lore; he had almost forgotten the sprite who had invaded his solitude the previous afternoon, until he heard a tap at the window, and saw her standing there--great, intelligent eyes aflame and rosy lips apart.

"May I come in, please?" her voice said. "I am afraid I am a little early, but I had something so very interesting to tell you, I had to come."

He opened wide the window and let in the May sunshine.

"The first of May and a May Queen," he told her presently, when they were seated in their two chairs. "And now begin this interesting news."

"Aunt Ginevra has promised to write to my step-father at once, and suggest that no more governesses are sent to me. Won't it be perfectly splendid if he agrees!"

"I really don't know," said Cheiron.

Halcyone's face fell.

"You promised to teach me Greek," she said simply, "and I know from my 'Heroes' that is all that I need necessarily learn from anyone to acquire the other things myself."

This seemed to Mr. Carlyon a very conclusive answer--his bent of mind found it logical.

"Very well," he said. "When shall we begin?"