They were living in the dreariest of dreary lodgings, in the dreariest of streets. But Israela welcomed me with a warmth I had not anticipated. “Oh, I am so glad to see you, so glad, so glad,” she cried, and her big, dark eyes filled with tears, and she clung to my hand. I was surprised by her emotion, because, after all, I was scarcely other than a stranger to her; a man she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl, and even then had seen only once or twice. I understood it afterwards, however: when one day she confided to me that—excepting Mr. Ambrose himself, and servants and tradesmen—I was the first human being she had exchanged a word with since they had come to London! “We don’t know anybody—not a soul, not a soul. He doesn’t want to know people—he is so absorbed in his work. I could not make acquaintances alone. And we had been here four months, before he met you and brought you home.”
Israela was tall, and very slight; very delicate-looking, with a face intensely pale, all the paler for the soft dark hair that curled above it, and the great dark eyes that looked out of it. Considering that she must have inherited a decent fortune from her mother, I wondered, rather, to see her so plainly dressed: she wore the plainest straight black frocks. And, of course, I wondered also to find them living in such dismal lodgings. However, it was not for me to ask questions; and if presently the mystery cleared itself up, it was by a sort of accident.
I called at the house in Pimlico as often as I could; and I took Israela out a good deal, to lunch or dine at restaurants; and when the weather smiled, we would make little jaunts into the country, to Hampton Court, or Virginia Water, or where not. And one day she came to tea with me, at my chambers.
“Oh, you’ve got a piano,” was her first observation, and she flew to the instrument, and seated herself, and began to play. She played without pause for nearly an hour, I think: Chopin, Chopin, Chopin. And when she rose, I said, “Would you mind telling me why you—a brilliant pianist like you—why you haven’t a piano in your own rooms?”
“We can’t afford one,” she answered simply.
“What do you mean—you can’t afford one?”
“He says we can’t afford one. Don’t you know—we are very poor?”
“You can’t be very poor,” I exclaimed. “Your mother was rich.”
“Yes, my mother was rich. I don’t know what has become of her money.”
“Didn’t she leave a will?”