“You quite understand,” continued Miss Strickland with her usual firmness, “that I make no promises. If you work very hard and improve, I will try to keep you, but it will require all the work you have in you. Now I am going to tell you, not _all_ the things that were wrong in your playing—that would be impossible in the short time that is left to us—but I shall point out a few of them which I shall expect you to overcome before the next lesson. “As you play the Sonata all wrong, I should suggest your never touching it again and starting to learn properly something you have never seen before. Are you listening to me attentively?” Elsie nodded, she tried to listen attentively, but she was hearing instead of Miss Strickland’s words the music of the spheres. The sons of God were shouting together in a newly created world. Her heart’s desire had been granted to Elsie. She was not going to be abandoned by the one being on earth whom she truly loved. It is unfortunate to have to confess at this point that both Elsie’s parents were living. Her father was a genial tradesman of the higher class of tradesmen; he did not serve in his own shop, and liked to romp with his children when he came home from business. Mrs. Andrews was a flighty, pretentious little woman, who had overlaid the maternal instinct by a desire to get on in the world. She would have liked a pretty little girl to show off to her neighbours, but she preferred boys. She had two of them, and she had brought them up to tease and tyrannise over their small sister. They did this without imagination or cruelty of intention, until they were old enough for school, when they ignored her. There were little things she could do for them in the holidays, and if she did them all right she could live in peace. It was a great relief to Elsie Andrews when nobody at home paid any attention to her, but it could not quite fill the whole horizon of youth. Miss Strickland filled the rest of it. Elsie believed in her as the wisest, most beautiful, and grandest of earthly beings. She sometimes wondered if Queen Victoria had ever been like her. Not in some ways; for Elsie hugged it to her heart as a golden but guilty secret that her goddess was “advanced.” Elsie would not have revealed it under torture, but she had seen Miss Strickland smoke a cigarette behind the shrubbery in the school garden. Probably Queen Victoria had never done this; she had lacked that final Napoleonic touch of audacity. Miss Strickland’s cigarette was the nearest thing to an adventure that Elsie had ever known.