Protest was clearly useless; and, having seen the two off, Michael came upstairs again to Aunt Barbara, who had no intention of going away just yet.

“And so these are the people you have been living with,” she said.  “No wonder you had not time to come and see me.  Do they always go that sort of pace—­it is quicker than when I talk French.”

Michael sank into a chair.

“Oh, yes, that’s Hermann all over,” he said.  “But—­but just think what it means to me!  He’s going to play my tunes at his concert.  Michael Comber, Op. 1.  O Lord!  O Lord!”

“And you just met him in the train?” said Aunt Barbara.

“Yes; second class, Victoria Station, with Sylvia on the platform.  I didn’t much notice Sylvia then.”

This and the inference that naturally followed was as much as could be expected, and Aunt Barbara did not appear to wait for anything more on the subject of Sylvia.  She had seen sufficient of the situation to know where Michael was most certainly bound for.  Yet the very fact of Sylvia’s outspoken friendliness with him made her wonder a little as to what his reception would be.  She would hardly have said so plainly that she and her brother were devoted to him if she had been devoted to him with that secret tenderness which, in its essentials, is reticent about itself.  Her half-hour’s conversation with the girl had given her a certain insight into her; still more had her attitude when she stood by Michael as he played for her, and put her hand on his shoulder precisely as she would have done if it had been another girl who was seated at the piano.  Without doubt Michael had a real existence for her, but there was no sign whatever that she hailed it, as a girl so unmistakably does, when she sees it as part of herself.

“More about them,” she said.  “What are they?  Who are they?”

He outlined for her, giving the half-English, half-German parentage, the shadow-like mother, the Bavarian father, Sylvia’s sudden and comet-like rising in the musical heaven, while her brother, seven years her senior, had spent his time in earning in order to give her the chance which she had so brilliantly taken.  Now it was to be his turn, the shackles of his drudgery no longer impeded him, and he, so Michael radiantly prophesied, was to have his rocket-like leap to the zenith, also.

“And he’s German?” she asked.

“Yes.  Wasn’t he rude about my being a toy soldier?  But that’s the natural German point of view, I suppose.”

Michael strolled to the fireplace.

“Hermann’s so funny,” he said.  “For days and weeks together you would think he was entirely English, and then a word slips from him like that, which shows he is entirely German.  He was like that in Munich, when the Emperor appeared and sent for me.”

Aunt Barbara drew her chair a little nearer the fire, and sat up.

“I want to hear about that,” she said.