She had covered her feet with her skirts and her hands were clasped decorously in her lap. Her brow had a male gravity, as distinguished from her chin which was softly-turned and exceeding feminine. Her hair was parted and trained in two shining unbroken portions and tucked away behind her ears, something as a curtain is looped back from a window. The sphinx-like mystery of Leonardo's La Gioconda was alive in her eyes.
Even while the girl, in her essential self, remained superlatively innocent and unconscious, there looked out from her little virgin countenance at Emil, gravely selecting him, the 'Genius of the Species.' Her glance proclaimed sex and intellectual detachment.
Presently Emil turned his face over his shoulder and beckoned to her; and his laugh was repeated by the water coursing up the beach and curling round the boat in white-lipped waves. The fog had disappeared and the sun was now shining joyously.
Rachel grasped the oars, rowing with long even strokes, and Emil sat in the bow. To one side of the boat and projecting into the water, he had attached a bell, which gave out when struck a special, sharp, short note; and on the other side of the boat he had placed a telephone receiver connected with a small box.
"And inside that box is another still smaller of metal," he told her, "and that contains the secret of the whole device. Did you ever hear of the microphone?"
She shook her head.
"Well, it's a tiny affair no larger than a pea, and will so magnify sound in connection with an electric current and a telephone receiver, such as I have here, that the footsteps of a fly on a sheet of paper sound about like the tramping of an army. It's so powerful," he continued, "that if I were to place it in the end of a tube and point the tube, say, toward that island out there, any noise going on—-a wagon rattling along the road or a child naming—I should be able to hear on this side, provided I had arranged the microphone so as to shut out all intervening noises. For instance, this microphone here is sensitive to no sound but that of the bell and the vibrations that I hope may be reflected back from the sea bottom. But we'll soon know whether it will work," he cried. "Row about twenty rods farther and then I'll tell you not only the depth of the water at that point, but the character of the bottom and whether it will be safe for our big liner to advance."
He was trembling all over and Rachel reflected his interest. She sent the boat forward a few strokes, then rested on the dripping oars. Nature, it seemed, was in her most approachable mood and at a hint of coaxing would reveal her secrets; yet the girl was conscious of something in the phenomena of the sea implacable and resistant to the efforts of man. Concealed promontories, hidden shoals, submerged headlands, treacherous peaks, drowned under the ceaseless rushing of waters—would the Voice come back bearing tale of all this?—or, if mud, weeds, fish, incrustations of shell—would the Voice proclaim safety, and the inventor know the very thickness of that rolling, beauteous mantle of mystery?
Nothing of the poetic significance of the test was lost on the girl, and she felt the hand of pity at her throat when she witnessed Emil's disappointment manifest all over him like a blight. Then she gloried when she saw him repeat the test.
Come what might, it was clear he had faith in himself.