But this trap for Mrs. Carter never brought the hunter his quarry, and quite independent circumstances led me closer. It was decreed that my sisters should have music lessons and who but Mrs. Carter was engaged to be the teacher? Twice a week she would come to the house, so now no human agency, it would appear, could prevent us from meeting. But for some time a human agency did do so, that human agency being myself, for on observing Mrs. Carter’s approach up the drive, an agony of shyness seized me, and I sat distracted in the day nursery until she had gone upstairs, and the noise of the piano from the schoolroom showed that she was engaged. Once, summoning up all my courage, I went in while the lesson was in progress, but she did not take her eyes off the copy of Schubert’s Impromptu in A flat, which Maggie was fumbling at, and I went out and listened in the garden for the cessation of the piano, on which, I determined, I would walk quite calmly towards the front door and thus meet Mrs. Carter there or thereabouts. But, alas for this faint-hearted lover, as soon as the piano ceased I walked in precisely the other direction, and it was not likely that Mrs. Carter instead of going down the drive would force her way through the laurel shrubbery in order to find me.
I blush to record the next step of my wooing. An invincible shyness (though I was not otherwise shy) forbade my walking down the drive as Mrs. Carter was coming up, or taking any direct initiative, so I laid a lure for her. Observing her approach to the house, I regret to say that it was my custom to lean out of the schoolroom window, singing loudly. This would certainly attract her attention (indeed I think that once it did, and I rushed, panic-stricken, away) and she would say to one of my sisters, “Was that your brother who was singing? What a charming voice!” And one of my sisters would say, “Oh yes, he is very fond of music.” Then surely, surely Mrs. Carter would say, “I don’t think we have met,” or perhaps even, “I should like to see him,” and then my sister would come and find me (for after these bursts of melody out of the window I always fled like a frightened dove to the nursery) and say that Mrs. Carter would like to see me. I had looked on her face by now, and I pictured to myself how her kind mouth would smile as she shook hands, and she would say, “We must be friends, mustn’t we, for we are both so fond of music.”