Aunt Adelaide was, unsurprisingly, a spinster, quite old, and a little dim. However, she was delighted to be of service to her rich cousins, and she was very sweet to Christine. She let slip the first day that the Comte had sent money for Christine's keep, so Christine was able to immediately dismiss Aunt's idea that she would continue as always and spend the Comte's money only on herself. The prospect of good, strong tea and beef more than once a week proved enough of a temptation, and Christine was thoroughly satisfied that the money would go straight to the household. She still had her own little account in the bank, if things got desperate.
In the meantime, Aunt was all friendliness, and Christine was happy to impose upon her for as long as she would be allowed. Aunt was not so poor as to be desperate, so she lived in a sort of genteel shabbiness. Christine was well used to shabbiness—much less so to gentility. She had always been careful of her manners, but Aunt was full of the sort of useful advice that would serve her well in any sort of good society. She learned the use of some of the more arcane pieces of silverware and how to arrange flowers. Aunt was very quietly horrified by Christine's lack of needle skills, so she also learned to knit and embroider, to darn her stockings such that they did not look quite so much as if each repair was a badly healed wound.
At night, as she braided her hair for bed, Christine often smiled over the irony that she was learning the sorts of skills that would make her a more suitable wife for Raoul. Still, she was glad to learn. As a singer, she would always be a member of the demimonde, but the trappings of respectability could only be welcome. It did not escape her that she was bothered relatively little by the knowledge that she would not marry Raoul. Mostly, she felt sad for him, that he did not yet know it and still dreamed of their happiness. Then she would be struck with guilt over her coldness. Surely she should be more miserable? She cried now and then, but very little. More often, she enjoyed her days, that they were a sort of remedial finishing school.
She knew that she loved Raoul. At first, she thought that she remained cut off from her own feelings, that at any moment she would be miserable. But as the days went by and her mind turned over the matter in the background while she embroidered a very ugly cushion and joined Aunt in the garden to pretend to trim the flowers, Christine began to understand herself. She did love him, but it was more like the love of their young friendship than anything else. She felt a pang for Raoul when she realized this and remembered the passion with which he sometimes gazed at her. She had wanted for him to protect her, to save her from her own fear and darkness. Now that she was away from the melodrama of the Opéra, her feelings had sorted themselves out, and she could think of giving Raoul up with relatively little pain. He too, she thought, had been caught up in the idea of saving her. He would not suffer very long—she hoped.
The Angel was another matter entirely. Christine was sure he must be dead, and this only added to the pain and confusion that surrounded her thoughts of him. She tried to gently move these thoughts aside, but she continued to dream of labyrinths, of things lost, and of music and kisses intertwined. She often awoke with tears on her cheeks or with her fingers pressed to her mouth.
Aunt knew none of this. To her mind, Christine was a friend of the family with a weak constitution, and she had been entrusted with the strengthening of this sweet child. Certainly it was strange that she had been educated so ill, but Aunt thought she must always have been delicate.
"Still," she said to Christine, one night after the girl had been singing over her embroidery, "your voice is like that of one of God's own angels."