her, which was the fact, as she told me afterward.  She cried whenever she sang a sentimental song, but never gave up to her tears, singing on with blinded eyes and quavering voice.  I laughed at her dresses which had been handsome, with much frayed trimming about them, the hooks and eyes loosened and the seams strained, but liked her, and although I did not take lessons, saw her every day when she came up to the Academy.  She asked me once if I had any voice.  I answered her by singing one of our Surrey hymns, “Once on the raging seas he rode.”  She grew pale, and said, “Don’t for heaven’s sake sing that!  I can see my old mother, as she looked when she sang that hymn of a stormy night, when father was out to sea.  Both are dead now, and where am I?”

She turned round on the music stool, and banged out the accompaniment of “O pilot, ’tis a fearful night,” and sang it with great energy.  After her feelings were composed, she begged me to allow her to teach me to sing.  “You can at least learn the simple chords of song accompaniments, and I think you have a voice that can be made effective.”

I promised to try, and as I had taken lessons before, in three months I could play and sing “Should those fond hopes e’er forsake thee,” tolerably well.  But Mrs. Lane persisted in affirming that I had a dramatic talent, and as she supposed that I never should be an actress, I must bring it out in singing; so I persevered, and, thanks to her, improved so much that people said, when I was mentioned, “She sings.”

The Moral Sciences went to Dr. Price, and he had a class of girls in Latin; but my only opportunity of going before him was at morning prayers and Wednesday afternoons, when we assembled in the hall to hear orations in Latin, or translations, and “pieces” spoken by the boys; and at the quarterly reviews, when he marched us backward and forward through the books we had conned, like the sharp old gentleman he was, notwithstanding his purblind eyes.

CHAPTER XVI.

I heard from home regularly; father, however, was my only correspondent.  He stipulated that I should write him every other Saturday, if not more than a line; but I did more than that at first, writing up the events of the fortnight, interspersing my opinions of the actors engaged therein, and dwindling by degrees down to the mere acknowledgment of his letter.  He read without comment, but now and then he asked me questions which puzzled me to answer.

“Do you like Mr. Morgeson?” he asked once.

“He is very attentive,” I wrote back.  “But so is Cousin Alice,—­she is fond of me.”

“You do not like Morgeson?” again.

“Are there no agreeable young men,” he asked another time, “with Dr. Price?”

“Only boys,” I wrote—­“cubs of my own age.”