The little man sat down at the piano and was off with the accompaniment on an instrument of the most outrageously tinny timbre before Nancy had finished deciding that he was not so much like a domino as a five-finger exercise. “_Eh, avanti!_” he turned round and shouted angrily. “What for you waita, madama? _Di nuovo!_” In the green twilight of this little room hanging over the precipitous cliff above the distant jangling of Naples Nancy could not feel that Maxwellton Braes had ever existed. She made a desperate effort to achieve an effect with the last lines. “And for bonnie Annie Laurie I would lay me down and dee.” There was a silence. Then the _maestro_ grunted, twirled his moustache, rose from the piano, and sat down at his desk. “Here I writa when you come,” he said. “_A rivederla e buon giorno._” He thrust the paper into Nancy’s hand and with the same gesture almost pushed her out of his apartment. The next thing of which she was conscious was walking slowly down the Vomero in the honey-coloured November sunshine and staring at the hours and days written down upon the half-sheet of notepaper she held in her hand. So the lessons began, and for a month she wondered why she or anybody else should ever have suffered from a momentary delusion that she could sing. She knew enough Italian by that time to understand well enough that Maestro Gambone had nothing but faults to find with her voice. “Have I made any progress?” she found the courage to stammer out one morning. “_Progresso? Ma che progresso? Non sa encora camminare._” Certainly if she did not yet know how to walk she could not progress. But when should she know how to walk? In her halting Italian Nancy tried to extract from the _maestro_ an answer to this. “_Quanda camminerà? Chi sa? Forse domani, forse giovedì, ma forse mai._” Perhaps to-morrow, perhaps on Thursday, but perhaps never! Nancy sighed. When she got back to the _pensione_ she sat down and wrote to her patron. Pensione Arcucci, Via Virgilio 49. Napoli. Dec. 8. Dear Mr. Kenrick, I really don’t think it’s worth your while to go on paying for these singing lessons. Maestro Gambone told me to-day that I might never know how to sing. I’m sure he’s disgusted at my slowness. I’ve been having lessons for a month now, and he has had ample time to judge whether I’m worth his trouble. He evidently thinks I’m not. It’s a great disappointment, and I feel a terrible fraud. But I’m not going to reproach myself too bitterly, because, after all, I would never have thought of becoming a singer if you hadn’t put it into my head. So, next week I shall return to England. I’m afraid your kindness has been....