The open-eyed little ruse worked like a piece of well-oiled mechanism, and Ballard broke off in the middle of a verse to go and drag Bigelow's deserted chair to within murmuring distance of the hammock.
"You were singing frightfully out of tune," she began, in mock petulance. "Didn't you know it?"
"I took it for granted," he admitted, cheerfully. "I was never known to sing any other way. My musical education has been sadly neglected."
She looked up with the alert little side turn of the head that always betokened a shifting of moods or of mind scenery.
"Mr. Bromley's hasn't," she averred. "He sings well, and plays the violin like a master. Doesn't he ever play for you?"
Ballard recalled, with a singular and quite unaccountable pricking of impatience, that once before, when the conditions were curiously similar, she had purposefully turned the conversation upon Bromley. But he kept the impatience out of his reply.
"No; as a matter of fact, we have seen very little of each other since I came on the work."
"He is a dear boy." She said it with the exact shade of impersonality which placed Bromley on the footing of a kinsman of the blood; but Ballard's handicap was still distorting his point of view.
"I am glad you like him," he said; his tone implying the precise opposite of the words.
"Are you? You don't say it very enthusiastically."