We left our coffee, and went to drink the Contessa's, which reached our lips chilled by the silent enmity of her friends. But, whether because their example had been a warning, or because he had suffered a "change, into something new and strange," the Boy was no longer a wet blanket. He did not show the self which I had learned to know in some of its phases, but he was shyly conciliatory with the Contessa, the blue eyes hinting that, if she were persistent, his admiration might be won. Still, he often answered in monosyllables or briefly, when she spoke to him, a smile curving his short upper lip. I could not understand what his manner meant, nor, I am sure, could she; but she was evidently bent on solving the puzzle. "Do you play tennis?" she asked him. "Yes." "Ah, so do I, and well, too, though I'm not English. Lord Lane will tell you that. And you dance, I know." "Yes." "You love it? I do." "I used to." "That sounds as if you were a hundred, instead of--nineteen, is it not?" "I'm not quite ninety-nine." "I should like to dance with you. We are the right size for each other in the dance, are we not?" "I'd try not to disappoint you." "Oh, we must have a dance. You love music, I know. One sees it by your eyes. Once, when I asked Lord Lane if he sang or played, he said that he 'had no drawing-room tricks.' Rude of him, _n'est-ce pas_? But you? Is it that you play?" "The violin will talk for me, if I coax it." "Ah, I was sure. We are going to be congenial. But the singing? I see by your face that you sing, though you won't say so. Here is a piano. I will accompany you, if you like, and if we know the same things. Perhaps our voices would be well together." I was surprised to see the Boy get up and go to the piano. "I will sing if you like; but I accompany myself, always," he said. "I don't sing things that many people know." For a moment he sat at the piano, as if thinking. Then he, who had never told me that he sang, never even spoken of singing, turned into a young angel, and gripped my heart with a voice as strangely haunting as his eyes and his little brown face. Had he been a girl, I suppose his voice would have been called a deep contralto. As he was a boy--I do not know how to classify it.