For although she could not golf, and her hands could not wield a tennis racket, Maria Angelina could play a guitar and she could sing to it like the angels she had been named for. And the young people at the Lodge had a way of gathering in the dark upon the wide steps and strumming chords and warbling strange strains about intimate emotions. And as Maria Angelina's voice rose with the rest her gift was discovered.
"Gosh, the little Wop's a Galli-Curci," was John Byrd's aside to Bob.
So presently with Johnny Byrd's guitar in her hands Maria Angelina was singing the songs of Italy, sometimes in English, when she knew the words, that all might join in the choruses, but more often in their own Italian.
A crescent moon edged over the shadowy dark of the mountains before her . . . the same moon whose silver thread of light slipped down those far Apennine hills of home and touched the dome of old Saint Peter's. She felt far away and lonely . . . and deliciously sad and subtly expectant. . . .
"'O Sole mio——"
And as she sang, with her eyes on the far hills, her ears caught the whir of wheels on the road below, and all her nerves tightened like wires and hummed with the charged currents.
Out of the dark she conjured a tall young figure advancing . . . a figure topped by short-cut curly brown hair . . . a figure with eyes of incredible brightness. . . .
If he would only come now and find her like this, singing. . . .
It was so exquisite a hope that her heart pleaded for it.
But the wheels went on.