“Listen!” It was Greta who held up a hand for silence as they passed out of the narrows. Music had reached her ears, wild, delirious music, such as one may produce only at the end of a terrific storm.
The storm was over—there could be no questioning that. The moon was out in all its glory. And there, his gray hair glistening in that light, standing before their tent on the camping ground, was the Phantom, Percy O’Hara. He was playing as perhaps he had never played before.
“Now,” Greta whispered, “I have found him. I shall never lose him again.”
Florence, you might say, was strange. At this dramatic moment she was thinking to herself, “A barrel, a copper-bound barrel. A barrel of gold.”
CHAPTER XXVII
GREEN-EYED MANSION
“A Barrel of gold!” Florence cried as the music ceased and she sprang ashore. “Come on! A copper-bound barrel! A barrel of gold!” She was able to keep her secret no longer.
Forgetting all else, Jeanne, Swen and Vincent followed her. Not so Greta. She had found her mysterious friend once more. She would throw discretion and all conventions to the wind.
“You—you will tell me?” She hurried up to the musician smiling there in the moonlight.
“Why, yes, my sweet little girl, if it will bring you joy I will tell you my secret which, after all—” he motioned her to a seat on a log by the fire. “Which, after all, is truly no secret at all.
“Being famous,” he said, smiling in a strange way, “is not all that men think it. To hear people say, ‘Here he comes! There he goes!’ and to know they mean you, to be stared at all day long! Who could wish for that?”