That mention of Sloane Street gave a twinge to Sheila’s heart. Ought she 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 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 songs that I know he likes. Madame, I think I can surprise you.”
He went 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 the girl is supposed to sing seemed so strange with those new chords that this boy-musician gave it, that Sheila sat down 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 that he had any,” Sheila said.