This hardness of her father’s had gradually hardened her feelings towards him. She had left off hoping for any change in him, and with the cessation of hope came a stream of bitterness which overwhelmed every sweet and filial sentiment. As she grew from child to woman, her memories of the past took a new shape. Well-remembered scenes acted themselves over again before her mental vision under a new and more vivid light. She began to see that there had been unhappiness in her mother’s life, and that her father had been the cause of it, that the cloud had always come from him. Brief episodes of that bygone life flashed back upon her with a cruel distinctness. She remembered herself leaning on her mother’s shoulder one evening as Mrs. Harefield sat at the drawing-room piano weaving the sweet tangle of Italian melody she loved so well. It was a summer twilight, and the windows were all open, the garden was full of roses, the river was shining under the setting sun. She remembered her father’s coming in suddenly, and walking up to the piano. He took her by the wrist with a hard strong hand that hurt her a little. ‘Go to your governess,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to your mother.’ And then, before she could reach the door, she heard him say,-- ‘So you have seen Antonio again.’ Those words haunted her curiously now that she was growing a woman. Who was Antonio? She could remember no one in the history of her life to whom that name belonged. It was an Italian name--the name of one of those Italian friends of her mother’s who came and went in those memory pictures, like figures in a dream. She could not distinguish one from the other. They had all pale dark faces, like ivory that had been long shut from the light, and dark gleaming eyes, and hair like the shining wings of the rooks in the tall old elm tops yonder. But she could not recall any one of them who had impressed her, a wondering child of seven, more than the rest. Yes, there was one--the one who sang so beautifully. She could remember sitting on her mother’s lap one evening before dinner, the room dimly lighted, no one present but her mother and the Italian gentleman. She remembered his sitting at the piano and singing church music--music that thrilled her till, in a nervous ecstasy, she burst into tears, and her mother soothed her and carried her away, saying something to the strange gentleman in Italian as she went towards the door, and he got up from the piano and came to them and stopped on the threshold to bend down and kiss her, as she had never been kissed before in all her life. She could remember the kiss now, though it was ten years ago. And he spoke to her mother in Italian, a few hurried words that seemed half sorrow and half anger. Was that Antonio?