Picking up his guitar again, he struck one full deep chord and began singing softly the "Bedouin Love-song," "From the desert I come to thee." The refrain floated tremulously through the library window.
| "Till the stars are old, |
| And the sun grows cold, |
| And the leaves of the judgment |
| Book unfold." |
It brought back the whole moonlighted desert to Lloyd, with the odor of orange-blossoms wafted across it, as it had been on two eventful occasions they rode over it together. She sat quite still in the hammock, with the bit of turquoise clasped tight in her hand. It was hard to listen to such a beautiful voice unmoved. It thrilled her as no song had ever done before.
As it floated into the library, it thrilled Mary also, but in a different way; for with a guilty start she realized that she had been listening to something not meant for her to hear.
"Oh, what have I done! What have I done!" she whispered to herself, dropping the book and noiselessly wringing her hands. She could hear voices on the stairs now. Eugenia and Betty were coming down, and Rob's whistle down the avenue told that he was on his way to join them. Too ashamed to face any one just then, and afraid that her guilty face would betray the fact to Phil and Lloyd that she shared their secret, she hurried out of the library and up to her room, where Joyce was rearranging her hair. In response to Joyce's question about her coming up so early in the evening, she said she had thought of something she wanted to write in her journal. But when Joyce had gone down she did not begin writing immediately. Turning down the lamp until the room was almost in darkness, she sat with her elbows on the window-sill staring out into the night.
"I never meant to do it!" she kept explaining to her conscience. "It just did itself. It seemed all right to listen at first, when they were talking about things I had a right to know, and then I got so interested, it was like reading a story, and I couldn't go away because I forgot there was such a person living as me. But Lloyd mightn't understand how it was. She'd scorn to be an eavesdropper herself, and she'd scorn and despise me if she knew that I just sat there like a graven image and listened to Phil the same as propose to her."
Hitherto Mary had looked upon Malcolm as Lloyd's especial knight, and had planned to be his valiant champion should need for her services ever arise. But this put matters in a different light. All her sympathies were enlisted in Phil's behalf now. She liked Phil the best, and she wanted him to have whatever he wanted. He had called her his "angel unawares," and she wished she could do something to further deserve that title. Then she began supposing things.
Suppose she should come tripping down the stairs some day (this would be sometime in the future, of course, when Lloyd's promise to her father was no longer binding) and should find Phil pacing the room with impatient strides because the maid of honor had gone off with Sir Feal to the opera or somewhere, in preference to him, on account of some misunderstanding. "The little rift within the lute" would be making the best man's music mute, and now would be her time to play angel unawares again.
She would trip in lightly, humming a song perhaps, and finding him moody and downcast, would begin the conversation with some appropriate quotation. In looking through the dictionary the day before, her eye had caught one from Shakespeare, which she had stored away in her memory to use on some future occasion. Yes, that one would be very appropriate to begin the conversation. She would go up to him and say, archly:
| "My lord leans wondrously to discontent. |
| His comfortable temper has forsook him." |