The girl, looking eagerly into his face, said: “You know quite well that you play your violin beautifully, I suppose?”
“I’m the rottenest player in the world.”
The girl at this gave a merry ripple of laughter and said: “Now I do believe in your theory, for I’ve heard you play beautifully in the grog bar by Rokeville. You played this”—here she closed her lips and hummed a melody from Il Trovatore.
“Good gracious! you don’t mean to tell me that you hover about the Rokeville grog shanty after dark?” exclaimed Hillary.
Gabrielle seemed surprised at his serious look, then she burst into another silvery peal of laughter that echoed to the mountains.
Hillary looked into her eyes, and seeing that eerie light of witchery which so fascinated him, felt that he had met his fate.
“If I can’t get her to love me I’m as good as dead,” was his mental comment. Even the music of her laughter thrilled him. Then she rose from the ferns, and sitting on the banyan bough again started to swing to and fro, singing some weird strain that she had evidently learnt from the tambu dancers in the tribal villages.
“It seems like some wonderful dream, she a beautiful girl with flowers in her hair, sitting there singing to me,” thought the apprentice.
Then she looked down at him, gave a mischievous peal of laughter, and said: “Oh, I say, you are a flatterer! I almost forgot who I really was while you were saying those poetic things about me!”
“Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious enough,” Hillary responded, as he looked earnestly at the swaying figure. Heaven knows how far Hillary might have progressed in his love affair had not the usual noisy interruption occurred at the usual crucial moment. Just as he felt the true hero of a South Sea romance—sitting there in a perfect picture of ferns and forest flowers, sunset fading on a sea horizon, dark-fingered palms bending tenderly over his beloved by a lagoon—with a rude rush out of the forest it came! It was not a ferocious boar, or revengeful elephant; it was a bulky, heavily breathing figure that seemed the embodiment of prosaic reality. It was attired in large, loose pantaloons, belted at the waist, a vandyke beard and mighty, viking-like moustachios drooping down to the Herculean shoulder curves.