“Very well,” Miss Strickland said at last, “you may go home if you want to—” But there was something in Elsie’s eyes which still held hers. “If I might,” whispered Elsie bravely, “play you ‘The Venetian Boat Song’—before I go?” Miss Strickland nodded. She led the way into a small practice room, out of reach of the festivities on the lawn. Then she sat down on a hard cane chair and listened to “The Venetian Boat Song” for perhaps the 500th time. It did not sound at all familiar to her. Elsie played it as Miss Strickland had never heard it played before. For the only time in her life music was captured by Elsie’s faithful, clumsy, little fingers. She played it dreamily, tenderly, with ardour and with grace, as Mendelssohn himself might have played it—who had the heart of a child. There was a little silence after the last notes sounded. “That,” Elsie explained as she turned round slowly on her music stool, “was the way I had meant to play it.” CHAPTER IV Onoria Strickland had an imagination that centralised its own experiences. She believed that for pure drama Little Ticklington outshone Paris. Its crimes were more lurid, its adventures more romantic, its types of character more truly representative of human nature. Her own career often seemed to Onoria Napoleonic, and her friends and her enemies were always larger than life. At first she undertook Elsie Andrews as a conscientious educator undertakes bad material, but as the years passed and Elsie’s affection stood solidly across Onoria’s pathway as immovable as granite, she began to find in Elsie strange and exotic virtues. “That girl,” she would announce, “has the mind of the Fourteenth Century—mature and adventurous! “She will do something one day. She is not like modern girls; she has character. Not that silly thing they call temperament, thank goodness!—temperament wobbles and stings like a jellyfish, and arrives nowhere—but good solid English character! Elsie won’t set the Thames on fire perhaps, but she hasn’t set out with any such theory. Mercifully she knows her limitations as a woman. What she has set out to do she will accomplish in spite of all obstacles—I call that dignified.” Elsie knew just what Onoria thought of her, because Onoria always told her friends exactly what she thought of them, even when it was nice. (After her twenty-first birthday Miss Strickland became “Onoria” to Elsie.) It was difficult for Elsie to believe that she was dignified, but she knew that she had a kind of strength. She found in herself a fund of resistance enabling her to guard her friendship with Onoria. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Andrews liked it; Mrs. Andrews because, like many mothers, it seemed to her unnecessary that her children should form any ties outside their home; Mr. Andrews because he foresaw that this concentration of his daughter’s heart might damage her future prospects.