This did not express quite accurately Lady Barbara’s intentions, for she chiefly wanted to find out what she thought of Sylvia.

“And you are great friends, you three?” she said as they settled themselves for the prolonged absence of the two men.

Sylvia smiled; she smiled, Aunt Barbara noticed, almost entirely with her eyes, using her mouth only when it came to laughing; but her eyes smiled quite charmingly.

“That’s always rather a rash thing to pronounce on,” she said.  “I can tell you for certain that Hermann and I are both very fond of him, but it is presumptuous for us to say that he is equally devoted to us.”

“My dear, there is no call for modesty about it,” said Barbara.  “Between you—­for I imagine it is you who have done it—­between you you have made a perfectly different creature of the boy.  You’ve made him flower.”

Sylvia became quite grave.

“Oh, I do hope he likes us,” she said.  “He is so likable himself.”

Barbara nodded

“And you’ve had the good sense to find that out,” she said.  “It’s astonishing how few people knew it.  But then, as I said, Michael hadn’t flowered.  No one understood him, or was interested.  Then he suddenly made up his mind last summer what he wanted to do and be, and immediately did and was it.”

“I think he told Hermann,” said she.  “His father didn’t approve, did he?”

“Approve?  My dear, if you knew my brother you would know that the only things he approves of are those which Michael isn’t.”

Sylvia spread her fine hands out to the blaze, warming them and shading her face.

“Michael always seems to us—­” she began.  “Ah, I called him Michael by mistake.”

“Then do it on purpose next time,” remarked Barbara.  “What does Michael seem?”

“Ah, but don’t let him know I called him Michael,” said Sylvia in some horror.  “There is nothing so awful as to speak of people formally to their faces, and intimately behind their backs.  But Hermann is always talking of him as Michael.”

“And Michael always seems—­”

“Oh, yes; he always seems to me to have been part of us, of Hermann and me, for years.  He’s there, if you know what I mean, and so few people are there.  They walk about your life, and go in and out, so to speak, but Michael stops.  I suppose it’s because he is so natural.”

Aunt Barbara had been a diplomatist long before her husband, and fearful of appearing inquisitive about Sylvia’s impression of Michael, which she really wanted to inquire into, instantly changed the subject.

“Ah, everybody who has got definite things to do is natural,” she said.  “It is only the idle people who have leisure to look at themselves in the glass and pose.  And I feel sure that you have definite things to do and plenty of them, my dear.  What are they?”

“Oh, I sing a little,” said Sylvia.

“That is the first unnatural thing you have said.  I somehow feel that you sing a great deal.”