He laughed again, tossing his fine head. "Oh, don't bother, Louise; I shall be safe enough with Stratton along. He never takes a risk."
Stratton smiled and adjusted the rolled blankets to his back, leaning on them comfortably. "The Captain's right," he said. "He knows me. I always ask myself first, 'Is it safe?' And then, 'Is it worth while?'"
The teacher looked at him a searching moment and arched her brows. Then she reached and lifted her sister's guitar from the end of the log. Her fingers trailed briefly over the strings and settled in a thread of tune. She repeated the accompaniment, singing softly, inviting Kingsley's tenor.
"She shone in the light of declining day,
Each sail was set, and each heart was gay."
And presently the other man hummed an undernote, but Louise was silent. She had changed her position a little, clasping her hands loosely around her knee, with her face slightly lifted and turned to the darkening wood. It was the face of a dreamer, rapt, sensitive, who peopled the shadows, and to whom the many voices of the night tuned in unbroken symphony.
In the interlude Kingsley turned to her. "Where is your voice, Louise? We need the contralto."
She started and looked at him, smiling. It was then she resembled Alice. The expression was there and the charm; but softened, finer, as the painting of a master may be reproduced in pastel.
Her voice was beautiful. She took up the song, subduing her notes to her sister's lighter compass, but the music, that had been simply pleasing, assumed, suddenly, the touch and finish of grand opera.
For the white squall rides on the surg-ing wave, And the
bark is gulph'd in an o-cean's grave, For the
white squall rides on the surg-ing wave, And the
bark is gulph'd in an o-cean's grave, in an
o-cean's grave, in an o - - ocan's grave.
