Mr. Wiltshire never relaxed his efforts to charm the people of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen to laughter, but he gave up trying to amuse Dorothy, and thenceforth devoted himself to girls with a keener sense of humor.
Once when Dorothy had refused to go for a long walk in the country round Aberdeen, the glittering of the granite buildings on a fine March morning tempted her out too late, and she wandered by herself along the sea-shore toward the mouth of the Don until she was able, so windless was the day, so warm the sun against the low sandy cliffs, to sit down on the beach. It happened that Mr. David Bligh, the tenor in "Miss Elsie of Chelsea," passed that way, and, seeing Dorothy, took a seat beside her. She had never intended her reserve with the other men in the company to include David Bligh, and from having felt rather sad at being left behind by Sylvia and Lily she now congratulated herself on her good fortune.
"All alone?" asked the tenor, fluting with his voice, as he always did when he was speaking to a woman.
"All alone," said Dorothy. "Isn't it too bad?"
They discussed loneliness with poetic similes harvested from the sea, upon the horizon of which nothing but a solitary tramp, hull down, was visible. So long as Mr. David Bligh's attention had been devoted to Miss May Seymour, the leading lady, Dorothy had been inclined to think that he was not very good-looking, that he did not possess a very good voice, and that probably he was not quite a gentleman. Now that he was beside her on this lonely beach she was inclined to modify all these judgments in his favor, and when suddenly he burst forth into "Che gelido manino," suiting the action to the word by simultaneously taking hold of her hand, she decided that not merely was his voice rather good, but that it was lovely.
"You really have a lovely voice," she told him.
He shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and with his stick drew some notes of music in the sand.
"I wonder why you never took up opera," she inquired, in tender astonishment.
"What's the good? The British public doesn't want British singers. Oh no," he said, with a glance full of reproach for the indifference of the sky, "I'm not fat enough for opera."
He went up the tonic scale to "la," frightening away some small sea-birds that had just alighted on the gleaming sand by the tide's edge.