* * * * * * * *
The melody, faint, coming from afar, indistinct yet unbelievably beautiful, having reached Greta’s ears once more and entered into her very soul, she stood as before, entranced, while the light faded. She was, however, thinking hard.
“Where can it be, that violin?” she whispered.
Where indeed? On that end of Isle Royale there are two small settlements. To reach the nearest one from that spot would require three hours of struggling through bushes, down precipices and over bogs. The traveler would be doing very well indeed if he did not completely lose his way in the bargain. It was unthinkable that any skilled violinist would undertake such a journey only that he might fling his glorious music to the empty air about the Greenstone Ridge. It was even more unthinkable that anyone could have taken up his abode somewhere among the crags of that ridge. On Isle Royale there are summer homes only along the shore line, and there are very few of these. The three hundred and more square miles of the island are for the most part as wild and uninhabited as they must have been before the coming of Columbus.
“It is a phantom!” Greta whispered, “A phantom of the air, a phantom violin.”
Had she willed it strongly enough, she might have gone racing away in fear. She did not will it. The music was too divine for that. It held her charmed.
What piece was it the mysterious one played? She did not know or care; enough that it was played. So she stood there drinking it in while twilight faded into night. Only once had she heard such music. In a crowded hall a young musician had stood up and, all unaccompanied, had played like that.
Could it be he? “No! No!” she murmured. “It cannot be. He is far, far away.”
Then a thought all but fantastic entered her mind. “Perhaps I have radio-perfect ears.” She had heard of people, read of them in some magazine, she believed, whose ears were so attuned to certain radio sounds that they could receive messages, listen to music with their unassisted ears.
“It has never been so before,” she protested. “Yet I never before have been in a place of perfect peace and silence.” The thought pleased her.