unremarked; but, in the house, every-day life required more courage than
scaling a wall. Girls are not brutal, like boys, but their light wit is
pitiless. The Southern pupils, provided generously with money in the
lavish old-time Southern way, the day scholars, dressed with the
exquisite simplicity of Northern school-girls of good family, glanced
with amusement at the attire of this girl from the Northwest. This girl,
being young, felt their glances; as a refuge, she threw herself into her
studies with double energy, and gaining confidence respecting what she
had been afraid was her island patois, she advanced so rapidly in the
French classes that she passed from the lowest to the highest, and was
publicly congratulated by Tante herself. In Italian her progress was
more slow. Her companion, in the class of two, was a beautiful dark-eyed
Southern girl, who read musically, but seldom deigned to open her
grammar. The forlorn, soiled old exile to whom, with unconscious irony,
the bath-room had been assigned for recitations in the crowded house,
regarded this pupil with mixed admiration and despair. Her remarks on
Mary Stuart, represented by Alfieri, were nicely calculated to rouse him
to patriotic fury, and then, when the old man burst forth in a torrent
of excited words, she would raise her soft eyes in surprise, and inquire
if he was ill. The two girls sat on the bath-tub, which was decorously
covered over and cushioned; the exile had a chair for dignity's sake.
Above, in a corresponding room, a screen was drawn round the tub, and a
piano placed against it. Here, all day long, another exile, a German
music-master, with little gold rings in his ears, gave piano lessons,
and Anne was one of his pupils. To Signor Belzini, the teacher of vocal
music, the drawing-room itself was assigned. He was a prosperous and
smiling Italian, who had a habit of bringing pieces of pink cream candy
with him, and arranging them in a row on the piano for his own
refreshment after each song. There was an atmosphere of perfume and
mystery about Belzini. It was whispered that he knew the leading
opera-singers, even taking supper with them sometimes after the opera.
The pupils exhausted their imaginations in picturing to each other the
probable poetry and romance of these occasions.

Belzini was a musical trick-master; but he was not ignorant. When Anne
came to take her first lesson, he smiled effusively, as usual, took a
piece of candy, and, while