Aunt Barbara suddenly got up.

“My dear, you are not the Miss Falbe, are you, who drove London crazy with delight last summer.  Don’t tell me you are the Miss Falbe?”

Sylvia laughed.

“Do you know, I’m afraid I must be,” she said.  “Isn’t it dreadful to have to say that after your description?”

Aunt Barbara sat down again, in a sort of calm despair.

“If there are any more shocks coming for me to-night,” she said, “I think I had better go home.  I have encountered a perfectly new nephew Michael.  I have dressed myself like a suburban housekeeper to meet a Poiret, so don’t deny it, and having humourously told Michael I wished to see a prima donna and a pianist, he takes me at my word and produces the Miss Falbe.  I’m glad I knew that in time; I should infallibly have asked you to sing, and if you had done so—­you are probably good-natured enough to have done even that—­I should have given the drawing-room gasp at the end, and told your brother that I thought you sang very prettily.”

Sylvia laughed.

“But really it wasn’t my fault, Lady Barbara,” she said.  “When we met I couldn’t have said, ‘Beware!  I am the Miss Falbe.’”

“No, my dear; but I think you ought, somehow, to have conveyed the impression that you were a tremendous swell.  You didn’t.  I have been thinking of you as a charming girl, and nothing more.”

“But that’s quite good enough for me,” said Sylvia.

The two young men joined them after this, and Hermann speedily became engrossed in reading the finished Variations.  Some of these pleased him mightily; one he altogether demurred to.

“It’s just a crib, Mike,” he said.  “The critics would say I had forgotten it, and put in instead what I could remember of a variation out of the Handel theme.  That next one’s, oh, great fun.  But I wish you would remember that we all haven’t got great orang-outang paws like you.”

Aunt Barbara stopped in the middle of her sentence; she knew Michael’s old sensitiveness about these physical disabilities, and she had a moment’s cold horror at the thought of Falbe having said so miserably tactless a thing to him.  But the horror was of infinitesimal duration, for she heard Michael’s laugh as they leaned over the top of the piano together.

“I wish you had, Hermann,” he said.  “I know you’ll bungle those tenths.”

Falbe moved to the piano-seat.

“Oh, let’s have a shot at it,” he said.  “If Lady Barbara won’t mind, play that one through to me first, Mike.”

“Oh, presently, Hermann,” he said.  “It makes such an infernal row that you can’t hear anything else afterwards.  Do sing, Miss Sylvia; my aunt won’t really mind—­will you, Aunt Barbara?”

“Michael, I have just learned that this is the Miss Falbe,” she said.  “I am suffering from shock.  Do let me suffer from coals of fire, too.”