Miss Wilkinson played the piano and sang in a rather tired voice; but her songs, Massenet, Benjamin Goddard, and Augusta Holmes, were new to Philip; and together they spent many hours at the piano.  One day she wondered if he had a voice and insisted on trying it.  She told him he had a pleasant baritone and offered to give him lessons.  At first with his usual bashfulness he refused, but she insisted, and then every morning at a convenient time after breakfast she gave him an hour’s lesson.  She had a natural gift for teaching, and it was clear that she was an excellent governess.  She had method and firmness.  Though her French accent was so much part of her that it remained, all the mellifluousness of her manner left her when she was engaged in teaching.  She put up with no nonsense.  Her voice became a little peremptory, and instinctively she suppressed inattention and corrected slovenliness.  She knew what she was about and put Philip to scales and exercises.

When the lesson was over she resumed without effort her seductive smiles, her voice became again soft and winning, but Philip could not so easily put away the pupil as she the pedagogue; and this impression convicted with the feelings her stories had aroused in him.  He looked at her more narrowly.  He liked her much better in the evening than in the morning.  In the morning she was rather lined and the skin of her neck was just a little rough.  He wished she would hide it, but the weather was very warm just then and she wore blouses which were cut low.  She was very fond of white; in the morning it did not suit her.  At night she often looked very attractive, she put on a gown which was almost a dinner dress, and she wore a chain of garnets round her neck; the lace about her bosom and at her elbows gave her a pleasant softness, and the scent she wore (at Blackstable no one used anything but Eau de Cologne, and that only on Sundays or when suffering from a sick headache) was troubling and exotic.  She really looked very young then.

Philip was much exercised over her age.  He added twenty and seventeen together, and could not bring them to a satisfactory total.  He asked Aunt Louisa more than once why she thought Miss Wilkinson was thirty-seven:  she didn’t look more than thirty, and everyone knew that foreigners aged more rapidly than English women; Miss Wilkinson had lived so long abroad that she might almost be called a foreigner.  He personally wouldn’t have thought her more than twenty-six.

“She’s more than that,” said Aunt Louisa.

Philip did not believe in the accuracy of the Careys’ statements.  All they distinctly remembered was that Miss Wilkinson had not got her hair up the last time they saw her in Lincolnshire.  Well, she might have been twelve then:  it was so long ago and the Vicar was always so unreliable.  They said it was twenty years ago, but people used round figures, and it was just as likely to be eighteen years, or seventeen.  Seventeen and twelve were only twenty-nine, and hang it all, that wasn’t old, was it?  Cleopatra was forty-eight when Antony threw away the world for her sake.