“But all that's done and forgotten now, and we can only guess a bit of it here and there. The tangible fact is this machine and these records, Beatrice. They're real, and we've got them. And the quicker we see what they have to tell us the better, eh?”
She clapped her hands with enthusiasm.
“Put on a record, Allan, quick! Let's hear the voices of the past once more--human voices--the voices of the age that was!” she cried, excited as a child.
CHAPTER VIII
TILL DEATH US DO PART
“All right, my darling,” he made answer. “But not here. This is no place for melody, down in this dark and gloomy crypt, surrounded by the relics of the dead. We've been buried alive down here altogether too long as it is. Brrr! The chill's beginning to get into my very bones! Don't you feel it, Beta?”
“I do, now I stop to think of it. Well, let's go up then. We'll have our music where it belongs, in the cathedral, with sunshine and air and birds to keep it company!”
Half an hour later they had transported the magnificent phonograph and the steel records out of the crypt and up the spiral stairway, into the vast, majestic sweep of the transept.
They placed their find on the broad concrete steps that in the old days had led up to the altar, and while Allan minutely examined the mechanism to make sure that all was right, the girl, sitting on the top step, looked over the records.
“Why, Allan, here are instrumental as well as vocal masterpieces,” she announced with joy. “Just listen--here's Rossini's ‘Barbier de Seville,’ and Grieg's ‘Anitra's Dance’ from the ‘Peer Gynt Suite,’ and here's that most entrancing ‘Barcarolle’ from the ‘Contes d'Hoffman’--you remember it?”
She began to hum the air, then, as the harmony flowed through her soul, sang a few lines, her voice like gold and honey: