ough the thought that he was
looking upon me as an awful nuisance would have made me awfully nervous
if I had let it, I just said to myself, 'here is your opportunity, seize
it. What does it matter about any one else?' And I sat down and sang a
scale, beginning with the lowest note I could manage, and going up, up,
up, and ending with a long shake on the two top notes."

"Bravo! bravo!" he said when I had finished, and he was no longer
standing at the window humming a tune, but he was at my side clapping his
hands and patting my shoulder. "Do you know," Eleanor said, her eyes
aglow with triumph at the recollection of that moment, "I had come in
hoping that he would give me five minutes of his time, and he kept me for
an hour, although two pupils were waiting for him in the ante-room."

"And what did he say?" queried Margaret, with an interest that was
positively breathless.

Eleanor suddenly sprang to her feet and began restlessly to pace the
room. The glow of triumph had faded from her face, and had been replaced
by a look of impatient despair that was almost fierce in its intensity.

"Oh, I can't bear to think of what he said!" she burst out. "I feel as
though I should go wild sometimes when I remember, when I know that I
have a gift which is given to few, and that it is wasted on me, locked
away, unless--for do you know what Signor Vanucini said to me?" she asked,
coming to an abrupt pause by the table. "He told me that I ought to be
the greatest singer of my generation, that he foresaw a splendid future
before me, that my voice had infinite possibilities, but that, of course,
it was utterly untrained, and that years of hard work and study lay in
front of me. That I must work, and work, and learn, and learn, and above
all have the best training from the first. And then he said that I had
better enter my name as a student at one of the colleges where he was a
professor, and that he himself would give me lessons. And, oh! the
bitterness of the moment when I had to say that I had no money, no
friends to pay for my education, and that I was earning my living as a
pupil teacher in a third-rate school in the suburbs. Do you know he
seemed almost as much upset as I was. He said it was a great pity, that a
voice like mine ought not to be thrown away, and he asked me a lot of
questions about Miss McDonald and the school. Did I think she would
continue to let me live with her, and come up to town three or four times
a week,