As he held the
door open for her to pass out into the street, some one ran quickly up
the steps, pausing on the topmost.
"Ha, Olga!" exclaimed Baroni, beaming. "You haf returned just too late
to hear Mees Quentin. But you will play for her--many times yet." Then,
turning to Diana, he added by way of introduction: "This is my
accompanist, Mees Lermontof."
Diana received the impression of a thin, satirical face, its unusual
pallor picked out by the black brows and hair, of a bitter-looking mouth
that hardly troubled itself to smile in salutation, and, above all, of a
pair of queer green eyes, which, as the heavy, opaque white lids above
them lifted, seemed slowly--and rather contemptuously--to take her in
from head to foot.
She bowed, and as Miss Lermontof inclined her head slightly in response,
there was a kind of cold aloofness in her bearing--a something defiantly
repellent--which filled Diana with a sudden sense of dislike, almost of
fear. It was as though the sun had all at once gone behind a cloud.
The Baroni's voice fell on her ears, and the disagreeable tension snapped.
"_A rivederci_, little singing-bird. On Thursday we will bee-gin."
The door closed on the _maestro's_ benevolently smiling face, and on that
other--the dark, satirical face of Olga Lermontof--and Diana found
herself once again breasting the March wind as it came roystering up
through Grellingham Place.
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