They went home to luncheon.  Nothing was said about the incident of the forenoon, except that Lavender complained to Mrs. Kavanagh, in a humorous way, that his wife had a most extraordinary fondness for beggars, and that he never went home of an evening without expecting to find her dining with the nearest scavenger and his family.  Lavender, indeed, was in an amiable frame of mind at this meal (during the progress of which Sheila sat by the window, of course, for she had already lunched in company with the tiny violinist), and was bent on making himself as agreeable as possible to his two companions.  Their talk had drifted toward the wanderings of the two ladies on the Continent; from that to the Niebelungen frescoes in Munich; from that to the Niebelungen itself, and then, by easy transition, to the ballads of Uhland and Heine.  Lavender was in one of his most impulsive and brilliant moods—­gay and jocular, tender and sympathetic by turns, and so obviously sincere in all that his listeners were delighted with his speeches and assertions and stories, and believed them as implicitly as he did himself.  Sheila, sitting at a distance, saw and heard, and could not help recalling many an evening in the far North when Lavender used to fascinate every one around him by the infection of his warm and poetic enthusiasm.  How he talked, too—­telling the stones of these quaint and pathetic ballads in his own rough—­and—­ready translations—­while there was no self-consciousness in his face, but a thorough warmth of earnestness; and sometimes, too, she would notice a quiver of the under lip that she knew of old, when some pathetic point or phrase had to be indicated rather than described.  He was drawing pictures for them as well as telling stories—­of the three students entering the room in which the landlady’s daughter lay dead—­of Barbarossa in his cave—­of the child who used to look up at Heine as he passed her in the street, awestricken by his pale and strange face—­of the last of the band of companions who sat in the solitary room in which they had sat, and drank to their memory—­of the king of Thule, and the deserter from Strasburg, and a thousand others.

“But is there any of them—­is there anything in the world—­more pitiable than that pilgrimage to Kevlaar?” he said.  “You know it, of course.  No?  Oh, you must, surely.  Don’t you remember the mother who stood by the bedside of her sick son, and asked him whether he would not rise to see the great procession go by the window; and he tells her that he cannot, he is so ill:  his heart is breaking for thinking of his dead Gretchen? You know the story, Sheila.  The mother begs him to rise and come with her, and they will join the band of pilgrims going to Kevlaar, to be healed there of their wounds by the Mother of God.  Then you find them at Kevlaar, and all the maimed and the lame people have come to the shrine; and whichever limb is diseased, they make a waxen image of that and lay it on the altar, and then they are healed.