"I have received a most agreeable letter from my sister in Paris."

This stopped Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and dashed my hopes to earth.

The severe lady continued to me:--

"My sister writes of witnessing a performance of the Lohengrin. Can you
tell me if it is a composition of merit?"

I assured her that it was a composition of the highest merit.

"It is many years since I have heard an opera," she pursued. "In my day
the works of the Italians were much applauded. But I doubt if Mozart will
be surpassed. I hope you admire the Nozze?"

You will not need me to tell you that I came out of Mrs. Gregory St.
Michael's house little wiser than I went in. My experience did not lead
me to abandon all hope. I paid other visits to other ladies; but these
answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who
admired Mozart. They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and of
the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it is
scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the
wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them. By patience,
however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain
knowledge, though small in amount.

If the health of John Mayrant's mother, I learned, had allowed that lady
to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth.
His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions,
was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster bring