"I even escaped the company of my maid, as you saw, though she tried hard to persuade papa that I should get into trouble without her. I believe she would have come at the last, even without luggage, if I hadn't been too smart for her and had the door locked. Lucky, wasn't it? We should never have been able to execute our little scheme with her about. Now tell me your story."
"No need to go too closely into that," said April. "No one will put you any piercing questions about my family, or be in a position to contradict your statements."
The Poole family tree, in fact, grew as tall and old as the Roscannon's upon the pages of heraldry, but drink and riotous living had perished its roots and rotted its branches long before April was born. Her father, its last hope, had been a scamp and gamester who broke his wife's heart and bequeathed the cup of poverty and despair to his child's lips. But these were things locked in April's heart, and not for idle telling in a railway carriage.
"I am an orphan without relatives or friends," she went on quietly. "No assets except musical tastes and a knowledge of languages, picked up in cheap Continental schools. I am twenty, and rather embittered by life, but I try not to be, because there's nothing can blacken the face of the sun like bitterness of heart, is there? It can spoil even a spring day."
Diana looked vague. In spite of tilts and tournaments with the Grizzly Bear, she had no more knowledge of that affliction of bitterness to which April referred than of the bitterness of affliction. The fact was patent in the gay light of her sherry-brown eye and her red mouth, so avid for pleasure. The book of life's difficulties, well conned by April Poole, was still closed to the Earl's only daughter.
"Perhaps she will know a little more about it by the end of the voyage," thought April, but without a tinge of malice, for in truth she was neither malicious nor bitter, though she often pretended to herself to be both. Whatever life had done to her, it had not yet robbed her of her powers of resilience, nor quenched her belief in the ultimate benevolence of Fate. Her joy in voyaging to a great unknown land had been a little dimmed by the prospect of the monotonous drudgery that awaits most governesses, but here, already cropping up by the wayside, was a compensating adventure, and her heart, which had been reposing in her boots, took little wings of delight unto itself and nearly flew away with excitement.