“Anna,” she said to the attentive girl, “tell me about your family in Germany.”

“My family?” said Anna.  “There is no family of mine, now, left in Germany.  My father—­he is here with me, my mother died when I was very young.  I can remember her a little, but so little that it makes my heart ache, for it is so ver-ry little.”

“I mean about your grandfather and grandmother.  Who were they and what were they?  You are certainly well educated.”

“My father and an old woman whom he hired, in London, have taught me what they could.  I studied hard because I had so little else to do.  It helped me in my loneliness.  Ah, I was ver-ry lonely, ach! in London!”

“Had you no friends?”

“I had my father and my M’riarrr.”

“Did no one ever visit you from Germany?”

“No one ever visited from anywhere.”

“What did your father do, there?”

“He played first-flute in an orchestra—­a theatre.”

“Did he never go back to his home—­his native land—­to Germany, you know, to see his relatives?”

“I think he has no relatives alive.”

“Did you never ask him about that?”

“If he had wish to tell me—­if there had been some for to tell about—­he would have told me without asking.  I never thought of asking questions about such a thing.”

“It’s very funny!” Mrs. Vanderlyn said somewhat pettishly.  “I could have sworn, from the first time I saw your father on the steamer, that he was a man of family.”

“Of family?  No; Mrs. Vanderlyn, I think not so.”

“And he has never told you anything?”

“He has told me, sometimes, that by and by, when something happens which he never will explain, we would go back to Germany.”

The daily lesson in court German then went on.  Mrs. Vanderlyn was plainly disappointed at the meagreness of Anna’s family history, and did badly with her lesson; but she could not possibly complain.  Anna had made no claims.  She had accepted her purely of her own—­she did not realize how much it, really, had been her son’s—­volition.  Anna had not asked for the position.

“I wonder,” she was thinking, when she should have been absorbed in conjugations, “if there can be the slightest danger in my having this girl here.  She’s pretty and she has most charming manners.  That accent is too fascinating, too.  John might—­but then, he is a boy of too much sense.  If she only had been what I hoped she was, when I saw them on the steamer—­but a mere flute-player’s daughter!  He would never be so silly.”

On later days the lessons sometimes went with better speed and more enthusiasm; but almost always Mrs. Vanderlyn was occupied with thinking of the social life she knew and wished to know, so rapid progress was not possible.