At nine o'clock that same evening, in a well-furnished drawing-room
half-way up Fitzjohn's Avenue, in Hampstead, a pretty, blue-eyed,
fair-haired girl of twenty-one sat at the piano alone, playing a gay
French chanson, to pass away the time.
Dressed in a dainty little dinner-gown of carnation pink, and wearing in
her well-dressed hair a touch of velvet to match, she presented a pretty
picture beneath the shaded electric-light which fell over the instrument
set in a corner.
Her mother, Mrs Shearman, a charming, grey-haired lady, had just gone
out, while her father, Daniel Shearman, a rich tool-manufacturer, whose
works were outside Birmingham, was away at the factory, as was his habit
three days each week.
Elise Shearman was just a typical athletic English girl. In her early
youth her parents were "making their way in the world," but at fourteen
she had been sent abroad to school, first to Lausanne, and afterwards to
Dresden, where she had studied music, as so many English girls have
done.
On her return to Hampstead, whither her father had removed from the
grime and toil of work-a-day Birmingham, she found her home very dull.
Because the Shearmans were manufacturers, the snobbishness of Hampstead,
with its "first Thursdays," would have nothing to do with them; though,
if the truth were told, Dan Shearman could have bought up most of his
neighbours in Fitzjohn's Avenue, and was a sterling good Englishman into
the bargain--which could not be said of some of those slippery,
smooth-tongued City adventurers who resided behind the iron railings of
that select thoroughfare.
Running her slim white hands over the keys, she began the gay refrain of
one of the chansonettes which she had learned in Paris--one of the gay
songs of the boulevards, which was, perhaps, not very apropos for young
ladies, but which she often sang because of its gay, blithe air--
Belloche's "L'Eventail Parisien."