Alice made a great crash on the piano and burst at once into a grand symphony. Instinct told her to play, and it was just as well she had done so, for one minute after Miss Hadley appeared with her perpetual knitting in her hand. She gave Frank a look when she perceived his change of position and herself approached the piano. A young fellow who was going to India! That was his sole and unique description to Miss Hadley,--and she was deeply indignant at his presumption. The symphony was a long one, but Alice was restored to herself. Safety had come in place of danger. She had not wanted Miss Hadley to return, and yet under shelter of Miss Hadley her faculties came back to her. There was a good deal of crash and execution in what she was now playing, and it suited her feelings. It was a kind of music which Frank would have scorned at from any other player, but oddly enough it chimed in with his feelings now. They were both tingling all over with soft emotion and that first excitement of early love, in which it is the man’s object to say as much as he may under covert of commonplace observations, and the woman’s to receive it as if it meant nothing and to escape from all appearance of comprehension. And yet if by chance they looked at each other both knew, not what they were aiming at certainly, but in some darkened, vague degree that there was a meaning, and a very decided one underneath. Then Mrs. Severn appeared again in her black silk gown, and the tea was set upon the table, and Alice made it as she had done before. It was like the same scene repeated, and yet it was not the same. Alice who had been to him but a fairy vision was now---- What was she now? Frank made a sudden jump from that side of the question, and felt his cheeks flush and a delicious glow come over his heart. But, not to speak of Alice, he himself was no longer an accidental guest received for his brother’s sake; but if not a friend, at least an acquaintance received for his own. To Alice at least he was more than an acquaintance. ‘I have lived in the same house with Miss Severn, and I feel as if we were old friends,’ he said, and Alice, with a soft blush and smile, did not reject the claim. ‘How pretty it was at Richmont!’ she said, with a soft, little sigh. And if it had not been for that dreadful old governess, who broke in, in the most abrupt way, with something about India! What was India to her? What had she to do with it? If a man wanted for the moment to forget everything that was disagreeable, what business had Miss Hadley to interfere? Frank as nearly turned his back upon her when she made her second interpellation on the subject as good-breeding would allow. Was it her business? He was very wroth with the meddler, but very soft and benignant with every one else, talking to Edith--to the child’s immense delight--as if she were grown up, and discussing games with the boys, and making himself very generally agreeable.