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When she had finished, Alice sat perfectly still, but with a look of visionary happiness in her eyes. She knew she had played her part well—perhaps more than well. Her father was a thorough pianist, though not quite a musician, trained up in the straitest sect of the German classic school of thirty years ago. He had taught her most patiently from the time that she could play the notes with baby fingers, and day by day he gave her all that he could impart of polish and technique. She was the hope of his life, and as she grew up he recognized with joy that she had something larger than the faculty for mechanical skill, inherited with his own long flexible fingers and musician’s temperament. But within the last year or two a larger ambition had dawned upon him; he believed that his daughter could be made into a great singer, and, recognizing that he could not deal with the training of her voice, he had at last scraped up enough money to send her home. So Alice Lauder was going out into the Old World to seek her fortune—though even the promise of being thrice Lady Mayoress of London would have