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You shall have her voice" smiling "I'll be content to hold her heart." But there was no answering smile on Baroni's lips. "Does she know everything?" he asked sternly. Max shook his head. "No. How could she? . . . You must realise the impossibility of that," he answered slowly. "And you think it right to let her marry you in ignorance?" Max hesitated. Then "She trusts me," he said at last. "Pish!
It was out at last the proposal which now, in the actual presence of the great man himself, seemed nothing less than a piece of stupendous presumption. Signor Baroni's eyes roamed inquiringly over the face and figure of the girl before him quite possibly querying as to whether or no she possessed the requisite physique for a singer.
In the first moment of Baroni's words Cecil's eyes had gleamed again with that dark and desperate flash of a passion that would have been worse to face even than his comrade's wrath; it died, however, well-nigh instantly, repressed by a marvelous strength of control, whatever its motive.
An intense vitality, a curious shy charm, the sensitiveness inseparable from the artist nature all these, and more, Baroni's experienced eye read in Diana's upturned face, but it yet remained for him to test the quality of her vocal organs. "Well, we shall see," he said non-committally. "I do not take many pupils."
Baroni's face darkened like a stormy sky, and his eyes literally blazed at her from beneath their penthouse of shaggy brow. "Max Errington! Donnerwetter! But that is the worst of all!" Diana stared, at him in mute amazement, and, despite herself, her heart sank with a sudden desperate apprehension. What did it mean?
It struck her as an odd coincidence that Baroni should be acquainted both with Miss de Gervais and with Errington, and at her next lesson she ventured to comment on the former's visit. Baroni's answer, however, furnished a perfectly simple explanation of it. "Mees de Gervais? Oh, yes, she sings a song in her new play, 'The Grey Gown, and I haf always coached her in her songs.
She was very silent as she and Olga Lermontof drove home together from the Embassy, but just at the last, when the limousine stopped at Baroni's house, she leaned closer to Olga in the semi-darkness, and whispered a little breathlessly: "I'm going back to him, Olga."
His face showed nothing beyond the polite, impersonal interest which any stranger might exhibit. "I have just missed the pleasure of hearing you sing, I'm afraid," he said, shaking hands. "Have you been back in town long, Miss Quentin?" "No, only a few days," she answered. "I had my first lesson with Signor Baroni the other day, and it was then that I met Miss de Gervais." "At Baroni's?"
Lawrence heard the exact form taken by Baroni's recommendation she might have felt less elated. "The Lawrence woman is a bit of a shark, my dear," he had told Diana, when she had explained that, owing to the retirement from business of her former landlady, she would be compelled after Easter to seek fresh rooms.
The Russian was for ever hinting at something in connection either with Max or Miss de Gervais; to-day she had but gone a step further than usual. "Well?" queried Max, reading the doubt in Diana's eyes. "I'm afraid I couldn't engage any one else to accompany me," she said at last. "You see, Olga is Baroni's chosen accompanist, and it might make trouble." A curious expression crossed his face.
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