"Oh, he knows we all are; but even after he has gone at night, we don't dare to go and look in. We can't pass that rock there—not even Eliza."
A charming tenor voice suddenly sounded on the air, singing an aria from "La Bohème." The girls looked and saw Edgar advancing toward the chicken-house, peering in curiously.
Suddenly, Phil, attired in a sweater and Mr. Fabian's trousers which scarcely reached his ankles, dashed out at the caller and pressed a scrubbing-brush on his acceptance. Edgar suddenly stopped his lay and ran, laughing, toward Mrs. Wright's, where he found the girls and took them out on the water.
"I should think you'd want to help him," said Kathleen wistfully.
"I do," replied Edgar, "but I restrain myself. Phil doesn't want me, really," he added; and he was certainly right. Phil had no time to stumble over Marcellines.
A week passed. Jane Foster had been smiling and important for the last few days, but not for kingdoms would Eliza have questioned her. She had acquired an air of calm indifference, which belied the burning curiosity within. When Phil stopped in passing to speak with her, she talked of the weather. Mrs. Wright, on the contrary, expressed her eagerness to see what was going on so near and yet so far from them.
"Pluto gets ahead of us," she said, "and you've trained him so well he never tells anything."
Edgar happened to be present and he shrugged his shoulders. "Better hurry up, Phil," he remarked, "and have your opening before interest wanes. You'll have an anti-climax the first thing you know."
Mrs. Wright turned the gentle radiance of her eyes on the speaker.
"We heard you last night, singing as you went home, Mr. Fabian," she said: "that lovely voice floating across the field will make us famous. People will hear it and wonder about the source, and begin to talk of the angel of Brewster's Island."