She told me of her love for music; and from the character of the pieces which formed her studies I knew that she must be a musician of a no mean order. The operatic melody which she had sung at the Colonel’s was, she declared, a mere trifle. We discussed the works of Rossini and Massent, of Wagner and Mendelssohn, and of Verdi, Puccini, Mascagni, Perosi, and such latter-day composers. I had always prided myself that I knew something of music, but her knowledge was far deeper than mine.
And so we gossiped on, crossing the Park and entering Kensington Gardens—those beautiful pleasure grounds that always seem so neglected by the majority of Londoners—while the sun sank and disappeared in its blood-red afterglow. She spoke of her life abroad, declaring that she loved London and was always pleased to return to its wild, turbulent life. She had spent some time in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin, but no one was half as interesting, she declared, as London.
“But you are not a Londoner, are you?” I asked.
“No, not exactly,” she responded, “although I’ve lived here such a long time that I’ve become almost a Cockney. Are you a Londoner?”
“No,” I answered; “I’m a countryman, born and bred.”
“I heard the Colonel remark that other night that you had been afflicted by blindness for some time. Is that so?”
I responded in the affirmative.
“Terrible!” she ejaculated, glancing at me with those wonderful dark eyes of hers that seemed to hold me in fascination and look me through and through. “We who possess our eyesight cannot imagine the great disadvantages under which the blind are placed. How fortunate that you are cured!”
“Yes,” I explained. “The cure is little short of a miracle. The three greatest oculists in London all agreed that I was incurable, yet there one day came to me a man who said he could give me back my sight. I allowed him to experiment, and he was successful. From the day that I could see plainly he, curiously enough, disappeared.”
“How strange! Did he never come and see you afterwards?”