The whole thing seemed too impossibly good to be true.  Diana felt as if she were in the middle of a beautiful dream from which she might at any moment waken to the disappointing reality of things.  Hardly able to believe the evidence of her senses, she found herself once again in the narrow hall, shepherded by the maestro’s portly form.  As he held the door open for her to pass out into the street, some one ran quickly up the steps, pausing on the topmost.

“Ha, Olga!” exclaimed Baroni, beaming.  “You haf returned just too late to hear Mees Quentin.  But you will play for her—­many times yet.”  Then, turning to Diana, he added by way of introduction:  “This is my accompanist, Mees Lermontof.”

Diana received the impression of a thin, satirical face, its unusual pallor picked out by the black brows and hair, of a bitter-looking mouth that hardly troubled itself to smile in salutation, and, above all, of a pair of queer green eyes, which, as the heavy, opaque white lids above them lifted, seemed slowly—­and rather contemptuously—­to take her in from head to foot.

She bowed, and as Miss Lermontof inclined her head slightly in response, there was a kind of cold aloofness in her bearing—­a something defiantly repellent—­which filled Diana with a sudden sense of dislike, almost of fear.  It was as though the sun had all at once gone behind a cloud.

The Baroni’s voice fell on her ears, and the disagreeable tension snapped.

“A rivederci, little singing-bird.  On Thursday we will bee-gin.”

The door closed on the maestro’s benevolently smiling face, and on that other—­the dark, satirical face of Olga Lermontof—­and Diana found herself once again breasting the March wind as it came roystering up through Grellingham Place.

CHAPTER II

FELLOW-TRAVELLERS

“Look sharp, miss, jump in!  Luggage in the rear van.”

The porter hoisted her almost bodily up the steps of the railway carriage, slamming the door behind her, the guard’s whistle shrieked, and an instant later the train started with a jerk that sent Diana staggering against the seat of the compartment, upon which she finally subsided, breathless but triumphant.

She had very nearly missed the train.  An organised procession of some kind had been passing through the streets just as she was driving to the station, and her taxi had been held up for the full ten minutes’ grace which she had allowed herself, the metre fairly ticking its heart out in impotent rage behind the policeman’s uplifted hand.

So it was with a sigh of relief that she found herself at last comfortably installed in a corner seat of a first-class carriage.  She glanced about her to make sure that she had not mislaid any of her hand baggage in her frantic haste, and this point being settled to her satisfaction, she proceeded to take stock of her fellow-traveller, for there was one other person in the compartment besides herself.