This last won the day as far as Miss Roberta was concerned.  Her faded cheeks flushed pink.  The trilling Italian love-songs, learnt some fifty years ago during a two years’ residence in Florence, had always been her pride and joy.  So she warmly seconded her niece’s pleadings, and the momentous decision was come to that James Anderton should be approached upon the subject.  If the child learned Greek—­from a professor—­and could pick up a few of Roberta’s songs as an accomplishment, she might do well enough—­and a governess in the house, in spite of the money paid by Mr. Anderton to keep her, was a continual gall and worry to them.

Halcyone knew very little about her stepfather.  She was aware that he had married her mother when she was a very poor and sorrowful young widow, that she had had two stepsisters and a brother very close together, and then that the pretty mother had died.  There was evidently something so sad connected with the whole story that Priscilla never cared much to talk about it.  It was always, “your poor sainted mother in heaven,” or, “your blessed pretty mother”—­and with that instinctive knowledge of the feelings of other people which characterized Halcyone’s point of view, she had avoided questioning her old nurse.  Her stepfather, James Anderton, was a very wealthy stockbroker—­she knew that, and also that a year or so after her mother’s death he had married again—­“a person of his own class,” Miss La Sarthe had said, “far more suitable to him than poor Elaine.”

Halcyone had only been six years old at her mother’s death, but she kept a crisp memory of the horror of it.  The crimson, crumpled-looking baby brother, in his long clothes, whose coming somehow seemed responsible for the loss of her tender angel, for a long time was viewed with resentful hatred.  It was a terrible, unspeakable grief.  She remembered perfectly the helpless sense of loss and loneliness.

Her mother had loved her with passionate devotion.  She was conscious even then that Mabel and Ethel, the stepsisters, were as nothing in comparison to herself in her mother’s regard.  She had a certainty that her mother had loved her own father very much—­the young, brilliant, spendthrift, last La Sarthe.  And her mother had been of the family, too—­a distant cousin.  So she herself was La Sarthe to her finger tips—­slender and pale and distinguished-looking.  She remembered the last scene with her stepfather before her coming to La Sarthe Chase.  It was the culmination after a year of misery and unassuaged grieving for her loss.  He had come into the nursery where the three little girls were playing—­Halcyone and her two stepsisters—­and he had made them all stand up in his rough way, and see who could catch the pennies the best that he threw from the door.  His brother, “Uncle Ted,” was with him.  And the two younger children, Mabel of five and Ethel of four, shouted riotously with glee and snatched the coins from one another and greedily quarreled over those which Halcyone caught with her superior skill and handed to them.