“I was left behind,” said Sylvia, “which was worse.  But I sent Hermann’s luggage.”

“So expeditiously that it arrived the day before we left for Munich,” remarked Hermann.

“And that’s all the gratitude I get.  But in the interval you lived upon Lord Comber.”

“I do still in the money I earn by giving him music lessons.  Mike, have you finished the Variations yet?”

“Variations—­what are Variations?” asked Aunt Barbara.

“Yes, two days ago.  Variations are all the things you think about on the piano, Aunt Barbara, when you are playing a tune made by somebody else.”

“Should I like them?  Will Mr. Falbe play them to me?” asked she.

“I daresay he will if he can.  But I thought you loathed music.”

“It certainly depends on who makes it,” said Aunt Barbara.  “I don’t like ordinary music, because the person who made it doesn’t matter to me.  But if, so to speak, it sounds like somebody I know, it is a different matter.”

Michael turned to Sylvia.

“I want to ask your leave for something I have already done,” he said.

“And if I don’t give it you?”

“Then I shan’t tell you what it is.”

Sylvia looked at him with her candid friendly eyes.  Her brother always told her that she never looked at anybody except her friends; if she was engaged in conversation with a man she did not like, she looked at his shirt-stud or at a point slightly above his head.

“Then, of course, I give in,” she said.  “I must give you leave if otherwise I shan’t know what you have done.  But it’s a mean trick.  Tell me at once.”

“I’ve dedicated the Variations to you,” he said.

Sylvia flushed with pleasure.

“Oh, but that’s absolutely darling of you,” she said.  “Have you, really?  Do you mean it?”

“If you’ll allow me.”

“Allow you?  Hermann, the Variations are mine.  Isn’t it too lovely?”

It was at this moment that Aunt Barbara happened to glance at Michael, and it suddenly struck her that it was a perfectly new Michael whom she looked at.  She knew and was secretly amused at the fiasco that always attended the introduction of amiable young ladies to Ashbridge, and had warned her sister-in-law that Michael, when he chose the girl he wanted, would certainly do it on his own initiative.  Now she felt sure that Michael, though he might not be aware of it himself, was, even if he had not chosen, beginning to choose.  There was that in his eyes which none of the importations to Ashbridge had ever seen there, that eager deferential attention, which shows that a young man is interested because it is a girl he is talking to.  That, she knew, had never been characteristic of Michael; indeed, it would not have been far from the truth to say that the fact that he was talking to a girl was sufficient to make his countenance wear an expression of polite boredom.  Then for a while, as dinner progressed, she doubted