“Dear old Phil!” Lord Ashden would exclaim. “I shall never forgive myself for not having insisted upon seeing him; and yet it would doubtless have caused him real humiliation and pain to have been sought out by his old friends, in such altered conditions. Well, at least I can try to make up for it all by doing what I can for little Philip, eh, my lad? And now,” he would say, jumping up suddenly, “let us go indoors for a little music. What shall it be this afternoon, your favorite Mendelssohn or some more Schubert?”
This was the way in which, after a morning spent out-of-doors, their afternoons were pretty sure to be passed. Lord Ashden had had a fine musical education, and he possessed the keen appreciation of genius which is itself a kind of genius; he soon discovered that Philip possessed a most unusual aptitude for the violin, and he set himself to the task of teaching him to play, at first for the diversion which it afforded himself, and then for the real delight which he felt in the boy’s progress.
One afternoon, late in the summer, when he had been accompanying his pupil on the piano through a very difficult concerto, he stopped suddenly and, wheeling about on the piano-stool, laid his hands on Philip’s shoulders.
“See here, my boy,” he said, “_I_ can’t teach you any more; an interpretation like that is not learned, but gained by direct intuition; you have lots of work to do yet, of course, and your bowing is not perfect by any means; but--well, you just keep on practising while I think out a scheme of my own.”
A few days after this Lord Ashden rode over to Lowdown and requested an interview with the rector and Aunt Delia in the former’s study.
“No one under thirteen years of age admitted,” he said, laughing as the children gathered around him in the hall as usual. The three friends were closeted for more than an hour, and when they came out Aunt Delia’s eyes were red as though she had been weeping, yet she looked very happy too; and at supper she exchanged meaning glances with her husband when the children inquired why Lord Ashden had not remained with them as usual.
When bedtime came Philip was told to remain in the library after the other children had gone upstairs, and then the secret of the afternoon’s conference was explained. Lord Ashden had ridden over from Ashden to ask permission to take Philip abroad for a musical education such as he believed could be secured only on the Continent.