As for Jerry! She was hoping no one could see the added color in her cheeks by the bright moonlight. During Danny’s rendition of the song she had occupied herself industriously with the wheel, her round, babyish face as nearly a blank as she could make it. Danny hardly ended the solo when she began clapping her hands in light applause.
“Bravo! You win!” she called out. “You certainly gave a fine imitation of a sentimental warbler, Dan-yell. Laurie didn’t think you could do it.”
“Oh, I have nerve enough for anything,” Danny retorted. “What does Mr. Lawrence Armitage know of my talents and capabilities?”
“Not a thing, thank fortune,” asserted Laurie with stress.
“You may have your guitar. I wouldn’t sing you another song if you begged me to. I am going to devote myself to Geraldine. She never treats me kindly, but she’s an improvement upon you.” Danny wisely produced this plea as an excuse to seat himself close to the wheel and Jerry.
She received him without comment, pretending to be listening to the buzz of conversation going on among the others. Laurie was running a series of chords up and down the guitar strings which had an oddly familiar sound both to her ears and Marjorie’s. He continued sounding them a moment or two, then glanced at Hal, nodding.
Suddenly Hal’s sweet echoing tenor voice lifted itself on the moonlit air in a lilting melody that Marjorie had good cause to remember.
“Down the center, little one,
Life for us has just begun!”
Hal was singing the quaint words of the Irish Minuet. To Marjorie it would ever be the song of songs. Like the prince’s kiss which had wakened the sleeping beauty from her enchanted sleep, sound of it had awakened her dreaming heart and opened her ears to the voice of love.