"I should like to," she said, and before he could catch the breath which had been suspended she had slipped off like a shaft of moonlight and was back like a ray of the sun, bringing a guitar in her hands.
"This was my mother's guitar, and now it's mine, and it's such a good one," she said, and with the utter freedom from self-consciousness which is the charm of children she sat and began to play. After a moment she stopped, with her head aside, and said:
"Which should it be, I wonder? But perhaps you know them all and would like me to sing something in particular?"
His face was down, the waves of emotion were surging through and through him. "Sing--sing anything you like, my darling," he replied.
The fluttered earnestness of his words startled her for a moment, but she only smiled with a new sweetness and began to sing, first in low, clear half-tones, and then in a high, tremulous treble that was like the peal of a lark at the gate of heaven.
Christian Christiansson could not eat; he could only rest his elbows on the table and cover his face with his hand. His own child was singing his own song to him in a voice that was like her mother's voice and like his own voice too!
When the song was done she turned to him again with eyes shining with unshed tears and said, "Isn't that beautiful?"
"It was beautifully sung, my child, beautifully!" he said. And then, after a moment, "Elin, would you like to hear something of the man who wrote that song and how he came to write it?"
Elin's eagerness was heart-breaking. "Indeed, indeed I should," she said. "Do you know your namesake then?"
"I have known him all his life, my child."