“You are very kind to take so much trouble,” said young Mosenberg, looking up with big, grateful eyes.  “Perhaps, madame, if you are not very busy during the day, you will let me call in sometimes, and if there is no one here I will tell you about what I am doing, and play for you or sing for you, if you please.”

“In the afternoons I am always free,” she said.

“Do you never go out?” he asked.

“Not often.  My husband is at his studio most of the day.”

The boy looked at her, hesitated for a moment, and then, with a sudden rush of color to his face, “You should not stay so much in the house.  Will you sometimes go for a little walk with me, madame, to Kensington Gardens, if you are not busy in the afternoon?”

“Oh, certainly,” said Sheila, without a moment’s embarrassment.  “Do you live near them?”

“No:  I live in Sloane street, but the underground railway brings me here in a very short time.”

That mention of Sloane street gave a twinge to Sheila’s heart.  Ought she to have been so ready to accept offers of new friendship just as her old friend had been banished from her?

“In Sloane street?  Do you know Mr. Ingram?”

“Oh yes, very well.  Do you?”

“He is one of my oldest friends,” said Sheila bravely:  she would not acknowledge that their intimacy was a thing of the past.

“He is a very good friend to me—­I know that,” said young Mosenberg, with a laugh.  “He hired a piano merely because I used to go into his rooms at night; and now he makes me play over all my most difficult music when I go in, and he sits and smokes a pipe and pretends to like it.  I do not think he does, but I have got to do it all the same; and then afterward I sing for him some songs that I know he likes.  Madame, I think I can surprise you.”

He went suddenly to the piano and began to sing, in a very quiet way,

  Oh soft be thy slumbers by Tigh-na-linne’s waters: 
  Thy late-wake was sung by MacDiarmid’s fair daughters;
  But far in Lochaber the true heart was weeping
  Whose hopes are entombed in the grave where thou’rt sleeping.

It was the lament of the young girl whose lover had been separated from her by false reports, and who died before he could get back to Lochaber when the deception was discovered.  And the wild, sad air that the girl is supposed to sing seemed so strange with those new chords that this boy-musician gave it that Sheila sat and listened to it as though it were the sound of the seas about Borva coming to her with a new voice and finding her altered and a stranger.

“I know nearly all of those Highland songs that Mr. Ingram has got,” said the lad.

“I did not know he had any,” Sheila said.

“Sometimes he tries to sing one himself,” said the boy with a smile, “but he does not sing very well, and he gets vexed with himself in fun, and flings things about the room.  But you will sing some of those songs, madame, and let me hear how they are sung in the North?”