‘You really think I have a good voice?’ Thyrza asked once, when they had grown accustomed to each other.

‘You have a splendid voice, Miss Trent!’ replied Clara, who delighted in bestowing praise.

’Do you think I shall really be able to sing some day—­I mean, to people?’

’Why not?  I fancy people will be only too anxious to get you to sing.’

‘In—­in places like St. James’s Hall?’ Thyrza asked, her ears tingling at her audacity.

‘Some day, I’ve no doubt whatever.’

Thyrza sewed, as a rule, for six hours a day, save of course on the days when she went to the Home.  For her leisure she had found so much occupation that she seldom went to bed before midnight.  In her walk to the omnibus which took her to Hampstead, she had to pass a second-hand book-shop, and it became her habit to put aside sixpence a week—­more she could not—­for the purchasing of books.  With no one to guide her choice, and restricted as she was in the matter of price, she sometimes made strange acquisitions.  She avoided story books, and bought only such as seemed to her to contain solid matter —­history by preference, having learned from Gilbert that history was the best thing to study.  Over these accumulating volumes she spent many a laborious hour.  At first it was very hard to keep awake much after ten o’clock; eyelids would grow so heavy, and the coil of golden hair (she no longer wore the long plait with the blue ribbon) seemed such a burden on the brain.  But she strove with her drowsiness, and, like other students, soon made the grand discovery that, the fit once over, one is wider awake than ever.  What hard, hard things she read!  ‘Tytler’s Universal History,’ in one fat little small-typed volume, very much spoilt by rain, she made a vade-mecum; the ’Annals of the Orient, of Greece, of Rome’—­with difficulty not easily estimated she worked her way through them.  An English Dictionary became a necessity; she had to wait three weeks before she had money enough to purchase the cheapest she could find.  At the very beginning of Tytler were such terrible words:  chronological, and epitome, and disquisitions, and exemplification.

’If I had someone to ask, what time it would save me!  Wouldn’t he help me?  Wouldn’t he be glad to tell me what long words mean?’

Never mind, she would do it by herself.  She had brains.  Poor Gilbert had so often said that she could learn anything in time.  So the lamp burned on till midnight.  Compendious old Tytler!  In his grave it should have given him both joy and sorrow that so sweet a face grew paler over his long hard words.

Had she not her reward before her?  Two years; in one way it would be all too short a time.  Not an hour must be lost.  And when the two years had come full circle, and some morning she was told that someone wished to see her, and she went down into the sitting-room, and he, he stood before her, then she would say, ’This and this I have done, thus hard have I striven, for your sake, because I love you better than my own soul!’