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 voice of the little Gaeta, following the song, jarred on my ears as she praised the Boy, and pleaded for more.

“I can’t sing again to-night,” said he.  “I’m sorry, but I can sing only when I feel in the mood.”

“But you will come with Lord Lane, and stay at my villa, which I have taken at Aix—­yes, if only for a few days?  The Baron and Baronessa will be with me, too.  You are going that way.  Lord Lane has told me.  Will you come?”

“Is he coming?”

“Lord Lane, tell him that you are.”

“You are very good, Contessa——­”

“There!  You hear, it is settled.”

“If—­Lord Lane makes you a visit, I will also, as you are kind enough to want me.”

Afterwards, when we had bidden the Contessa and her guardian dragons good-night, and it was arranged that we were to stay over to-morrow, on account of the lost bag, I said to the Boy on the way upstairs, “You’ve made a conquest of the Contessa.”

He blushed furiously, looked angry, and then burst out laughing.  “Are you jealous?” he asked.

“I ought to be.”

“But are you?”

“I haven’t had time to analyse my emotions.  Why did you never tell me you sang?”

“I wasn’t ready—­till to-night.  Now—­I sang for you.”

“I thought it was for the Contessa.”

“Did you?  Well”—­with sudden crossness—­“you may go on thinking so, if you like.  Can she sing?”