“But what haf you been doing during the holidays?” exclaimed the maestro at last, his odd, husky voice fierce with annoyance.  “There is no ease—–­no flexibility.  You are as stiff as a rusty hinge.  Ach!  But you will haf to work—­not play any more.”

He frowned portentously, then with a swift change to a more reasonable mood, he continued:—­

“Let us haf some songs—­Saint-Saens’ Amour, viens aider.  Perhaps that will wake you up, hein?”

Instead, it carried Diana swiftly back to the Rectory at Crailing, to the evening when she had sung this very song to Max Errington, with the unhappy Joan stumbling through the accompaniment.  She began to sing, her mind occupied with quite other matters than Delilah’s passion of vengeance, and her face expressive of nothing more stirring than a gentle reminiscence.  Baroni stopped abruptly and placed a big mirror in front of her.

“Please to look at your face, Mees Quentin,” he said scathingly.  “It is as wooden as your singing.”

He was a confirmed advocate of the importance of facial expression in a singer, and Diana’s vague, abstracted look was rapidly raising his ire.  Recalled by the biting scorn in his tones, she made a gallant effort to throw herself more effectually into the song, but the memory of Errington’s grave, intent face, as he had sat listening to her that night, kept coming betwixt her and the meaning of the music—­and the result was even more unpromising than before.

In another moment Baroni was on his feet, literally dancing with rage.

“But do you then call yourself an artiste?” he broke out furiously.  “Why has the good God given you eyes and a mouth?  That they may express nothing—­nothing at all?  Bah!  You haf the face of a gootta-per-r-rcha doll!”

And snatching up the music from the piano in an uncontrollable burst of fury, he flung it straight at her, and the two of them stood glaring at each other for a few moments in silence.  Then Baroni pointed to the song, lying open on the floor between them, and said explosively:—­

“Pick that up.”

Diana regarded him coolly, her small face set like a flint.

“No.”  She fairly threw the negative at him,

He stared at her—­he was accustomed to more docile pupils—­and the two girls who had remained in the room to listen to the lessons following their own huddled together with scared faces.  The maestro in a royal rage was ever, in their opinion, to be regarded from much the same viewpoint as a thunderbolt, and that any one of his pupils should dare to defy him was unheard-of.  In the same situation as that in which Diana found herself, either of the two girls in question would have meekly picked up the music and, dissolving into tears, made the continuance of the lesson an impossibility, only to be bullied by the maestro even more execrably next time.