Thurley looked at him for a long, glorious moment. After all, it had been worth the winter’s work and bewildering experiences. To make her début—would she ever forget the day in the stableyard of the Hotel Button when Dan engaged her to sing at his circus, rival to the “great swinging man”—and she had told him then that some day she was to sing before great audiences—maybe earning as much as a dollar a night! “I’m not ready,” she began. “You will be—stage directions, a good maid, a press agent, Santoza’s coaching and a little polishing here and there. I told you the first day you sang for me that God had taught you how to sing, man merely teaching you what.” “Abroad—London—Paris—Spain—” Thurley began to whisper. “It’s true—isn’t it?—say that it is—,” dancing up to him, her eyes like stars. “Don’t be too happy,” he suggested almost testily, “I can’t bear to see it!” “Why not?” she was the aggrieved, wild-rose child speaking her mind regardless of the person who was listening. “Because _you_ are not happy?” “No, because you must find out sooner or later that each life is given so much happiness, pain, cowardice, bravery, all attributes and emotions, the same as we are physically endowed with so much eyesight, hearing, power of locomotion, and when you realize that and know that when you burn up all the joy and ecstasy of unthinking youth, there is nothing, nothing that can ever cause such joy to exist again or give one such an abandon of mirth—all the rest of life snails on in gray patterns—I’d like to have you save your joy for things more worth while than this, distribute it so it will last through the gray days, Thurley!” Looking at him, Thurley saw that his face was a dangerous, shiny white as if he had been ill a long time and his eyes were deadish, burnt-out things. “I am sorry,” she began impulsively, “that you’ve no joy left—” Hobart recalled himself and began pointing out errors in her last song. They did not go beneath the surface again during the lesson. When it was finished, Hobart said November would probably be the month of her début,—not in “Faust” as she had fondly imagined but as the vivacious _Rosina_ in “The Barber of Seville”; protest all she liked, _Rosina_ it was to be. “That is nearly seven months away,” he said, looking out at the April sky. “Ernestine writes she will be home by June and you will start soon after. You must be back by the middle of September—however, that gives you quite a holiday. From now on, Thurley, I shall not see you—” he held out his hand but she did not seem to notice. “Where are you going?”