, so do I, and well, too, though I'm not English. Lord Lane will
tell you that. And you dance, I know."

"Yes."

"You love it? I do."

"I used to."

"That sounds as if you were a hundred, instead of--nineteen, is it
not?"

"I'm not quite ninety-nine."

"I should like to dance with you. We are the right size for each other
in the dance, are we not?"

"I'd try not to disappoint you."

"Oh, we must have a dance. You love music, I know. One sees it by your
eyes. Once, when I asked Lord Lane if he sang or played, he said that
he 'had no drawing-room tricks.' Rude of him, _n'est-ce pas_? But you?
Is it that you play?"

"The violin will talk for me, if I coax it."

"Ah, I was sure. We are going to be congenial. But the singing? I see
by your face that you sing, though you won't say so. Here is a piano.
I will accompany you, if you like, and if we know the same things.
Perhaps our voices would be well together."

I was surprised to see the Boy get up and go to the piano. "I will
sing if you like; but I accompany myself, always," he said. "I don't
sing things that many people know."

For a moment he sat at the piano, as if thinking. Then he, who had
never told me that he sang, never even spoken of singing, turned into
a young angel, and gripped my heart with a voice as strangely
haunting as his eyes and his little brown face. Had he been a girl, I
suppose his voice would have been called a deep contralto. As he was a
boy--I do not know how to classify it.

I can say only that, while the mellow music rippled from his parted
lips, it seemed as if the gates of Paradise had fallen ajar. He sang
an old ballad that I had never heard. It was all about "Douglas
Gordon," whose story flowed with the tide of a plaintive accompaniment
which I think he must have arranged himself: for somehow, it was like
him. All the sadness, all the sweetness in this sweet, sad, old world
seemed concentrated in the Boy's angel voice, and listening, I was
Douglas Gordon, and he was putting my life-sorrow into words. He took
my heart and broke it, yet I would not have had him stop. Then,
suddenly, he did stop, and the Contessa was in tears. "Bravo! bravo!"
she cried, diamonds raining over two spasmodic dimples. "Again;
something else."

He sang Christina Rossetti's "Perchance you may remember, perchance
you may forget," and the thrill of it was in the marrow of my bones. I
had scarcely known before what music could do with me, and the voic