Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister. Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my "Etude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy--a gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle." "Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge." I began again--_allegro_, as I thought. But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands. "How _can_ I? You expect me to be as quick as God!" I think this must have been after that act of His which gave us a sense of surpassing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always the hand of a very young child--so soft and pliant that you wondered if there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her playing, and saw the way in which, when she was stirred, she brought down the flying hands on some rich, resolving chord. Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections of old English song: "_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_" We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the first thing she sang in English. I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the mythology stories were in French. And we seemed to fall into that tongue only by chance when we went collecting treasures for our herbarium, or the fresh-water aquarium. We found out by-and-by that the walks we thought so adventurously long were little walks. We also found that our world was less uninhabited than we thought. Duncombe, we discovered, stood midway between two large country houses. Besides the cottage of Kleiner Klaus, there were other small peasant holdings, dotted like islands in our sea of green--brave little enclosures made, as we heard later, by the few who refused to be wholly dispossessed when, in the eighteenth century, the open heath had been taken from the people. Our own Duncombe, which we thought very grand and spacious, had been only a superior sort of farmhouse. Everyone has marked the shrinkage in those nobler spaces we knew as children. In our case, not all imaginary, the difference between what we thought was "ours" and what, for the time being, was. We never doubted but the boundless heath belonged to us as much as our garden did.