“I don’t see what that has to do with it,”—­she said—­“Would you have preferred to live in the Convent altogether, dear?”

“Grand merci!” and Cicely made an expressive grimace—­“Not I!  I should not have had half as many lessons from Gigue, and I should never have been able to write to you without the Mere Superieure spying into my letters.  That’s why none of the girls are allowed to have sealing wax, because all their letters are ungummed over a basin of hot water and read before going to post.  Discipline, discipline!  Torquemada’s Inquisition was nothing to it!  Of course I had to tell the Mere Superieure that you had sent for me, and that I should be away all summer.  She asked heaps of questions, but she got nothing out of me, so of course she wrote to your aunt.  But that doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Not in the least,”—­answered Maryllia, decisively,—­“My aunt has nothing whatever to do with me now, nor I with her.  I am my own mistress.”

“And it becomes you amazingly!” declared Cicely—­“I never saw you looking prettier!  You are just the sweetest thing that ever fell out of heaven in human shape!  Oh, Maryllia, what a lovely, lovely place this is!  And is it all yours?—­your very, very own?”

“My very, very own!” and Maryllia, in replying to the question, felt a thrill of legitimate pride in the beautiful old Tudor house of her ancestors,—­“I wish I had never been taken away from it!  The more I see of it, the more I feel I ought not to have left it so long.”

“It is real home, sweet home!” said Cicely, and her great eyes grew suddenly sad and wistful, as she slipped a caressing arm round her friend’s waist—­“How grateful I am to you for asking me to come and stay in it!  Because, after all, I am only a poor little peasant,—­ with a musical faculty!”

Maryllia kissed her affectionately.

“You are a genius, my dear!” she said—­“There’s is no higher supremacy.  What does Gigue say of you now?”

“Gigue is satisfied, I think.  But I don’t really know.  He says I’m too precocious—­that my voice is a woman’s before I’m a girl.  It’s abnormal—­and I’m abnormal too.  I know I am,—­and I know it’s horrid—­but I can’t help it!  Whers’a the piano?”

“There isn’t one in the house,” said Maryllia, smiling; “Abbot’s Manor has always lived about a hundred and fifty years behind the times.  But I’ve sent for a boudoir grand—­it will be here this week.  Meanwhile, won’t this do?” and she pointed to a quaint little instrument occupying a recess near the window—­“It’s a spinet of Charles the Second’s period—–­”

“Delightful!” cried Cicely, ecstatically—­“There’s nothing sweeter in the whole world to sing to!”

Opening the painted lid with the greatest tenderness and care, she passed her hands lightly over the spinet’s worn and yellow ivory keys and evoked a faint fairy-like tinkling.

“Listen!  Isn’t it like the wandering voice of some little ghost of the past trying to speak to us?” she said—­“And in such sweet tune, too!  Poor little ghost!  Shall I sing to you?  Shall I tell you that we have a sympathy in common with you, even though you are so old and so far, far away!”