The white glory of the night, the tender beauty of the girl he adored, her avowed enthusiastic preference for work above all else in life had crystallized Hal’s troubled resolve to ask Marjorie the momentous question which, somehow, he had never before found the right opportunity for asking. And Jerry and Danny had “butted in” and spoiled it! This was his rueful reflection as he silently allowed Jerry to replace him at the wheel.
“I won’t be stingy with the wheel,” he soberly assured his sister, “but you’d better ask Dan-yell to sing.”
“Never. I have too much consideration for the rest of the gang,” Jerry retorted.
“And I have myself to consider,” flung back Danny. “I wouldn’t sing if Jerry-miar dropped to her knees on the sand and begged me to. Understand, every one of you, I can sing, warble, carol, chant or trill. There is no limit to my vocal powers. There was a time when I might possibly have been persuaded to sing. That time is past.”
“Thank you, Jerry,” Laurie said very solemnly.
“You’re welcome,” chuckled Jerry. “Glad I could be so useful.”
“O, don’t be too ready to laugh. I may sing just for spite,” Danny warned. “To sing, or not to sing? That is the question.”
“Take time to think it over, Danny,” laughed Marjorie. “While you are thinking Connie will sing the song of Brahms I like so much. Please, Connie, sing ‘The Summer Fields,’” she urged. “Then you’ll sing, won’t you, Hal?” She turned coaxingly to Hal who had seated himself beside her on one of the built-in benches of the motor boat.
“Maybe,” Hal made half reluctant promise. He was wishing he dared take Marjorie’s slim hands, lying tranquilly in her lap, and imprison them in his own.
Glancing frankly up at him Marjorie glimpsed in his eyes a bright intent look which hardly pleased her. It was an expression which was quite new to his face. She thought, or rather, feared she understood its meaning. “He’ll go on with what he started to say to me the very first chance he has,” was her dismayed reflection. “Oh, dear; I wish he wouldn’t.”
Laurie had already begun a soft prelude to “The Summer Fields.” Marjorie had immediately looked away from Hal and out on the moonlit sea. She had the impression that Hal’s eyes were still upon her. She felt the hot blood rise afresh to her cheeks. For a brief instant she was visited by a flash of resentment. Why, oh, why, must Hal spoil their long, sincere friendship by trying to turn it into a love affair?
Again Constance’s golden tones rose and fell, adding to the enchantment of the night. Marjorie’s instant of resentment took swift wing as she listened to the wistful German words for which the great composer had found such a perfect setting. She was glad she loved music and moonlight and poetry and all the beautiful bits of life. She did not wish life to mean the kind of romance Hal meant. Her idea of romance meant the glory of work and the stir of noble deeds.
“Now it’s your turn, Hal. It’s not fair to make me do all the singing. Jerry claims she can’t sing, and she won’t let Danny sing. Laurie makes me do his share of it. Marjorie can sing, but she thinks she can’t. That leaves only you, and you haven’t a ghost of an excuse. Go ahead now. Be nice and sing the Boat Song.” Constance ended coaxingly.
“All right, Connie. Instruct your husband to play a few bars of it strictly in tune and I’ll see what I can do.” Hal straightened up suddenly on the bench with an air of pretended importance.
“See to it that your singing’s strictly in tune,” Laurie advised. “I can be trusted to do the rest.” Already his musician’s fingers were finding the rhythmic introduction to Tosti’s “Boat Song.”
“The night wind sighs,
Our vessel flies,
Across the dark lagoon.”
Hal took up the swinging measures of the song in his clear, sweet tenor and sent it ringing across the water. Tonight he came into a new and sombre understanding of the song. Never before had he realized the undercurrent of doubt it contained. Perhaps Tosti had composed the song out of his own lover’s hopes and fears. Unconsciously Hal’s weight of troubled doubt went into an impassioned rendering.
Laurie and Constance understood perfectly his unintentional betrayal of his feelings. Danny, razor keen of perception, also grasped the situation. This time he had nothing to say.
“And here am I,
To live or die;
As you prove hard or kind;
Prove hard or kind.”
Jerry sat looking unduly solemn as Hal tunefully voiced the sentimental, worshipping lines and took up the echoing refrain. When the song ended an odd silence fell which no one of them seemed willing to shatter. Connie and Laurie were frankly holding hands, their young faces touched with a romance born of music and moonlight. Danny was staring intently at Jerry as though absorbed in her management of the wheel.
Marjorie sat bathed in moonlight, looking unutterably lovely and trying her utmost not to appear self-conscious. She was under the blind impression that she alone understood what lay behind Hal’s song. In reality she understood less concerning the strength of his love and devotion for her than did those who had been their intimate girl and boyhood friends. She did, however, detect a certain melancholy tinge to his singing which gave her a peculiar conscience-stricken feeling.
“No, I don’t care to sing any more tonight,” he said, when Laurie came out of his dream and asked him to sing an old Spanish serenade. “I’m not in a singing humor.”
“Poor old Hal,” Jerry was thinking as she gave the wheel an impatient turn by way of showing her disapproval. “He does love her so! Marjorie’s the sweetest girl ever, but she’s hard, not kind, when it comes to love. She’s a regular stony heart.”
CHAPTER III. – “SOMETHING TO REPORT”
“Tomorrow? Let me think.” Marjorie’s dark brows drew thoughtfully together. “Why, I’m not going anywhere, Hal.” Marjorie made an effort to be casual which was only half successful. “I’m going to be busy packing. I shall have to take an early train for Hamilton on Thursday morning so as not to reach there late at night. I won’t have a minute’s spare time Thursday morning. I’ll have to be ready as ready can be on Wednesday night.”
The boating party had left the Oriole once more tied to the pier and had strolled back along the sands to Cliff House. To her surprised relief, Hal had not attempted to renew the subject she dreaded to discuss. In fact he had had very little to say. Responsive to this new mood of his she had walked beside him almost in silence, smiling at the animated discussion Jerry and Danny kept up all the way to the hotel. Laurie and Connie were as mute as she and Hal. Such understanding silences were characteristic of them, however.
As ardently as he had courted an opportunity to tell Marjorie he loved her Hal now upbraided himself for having been so stupid as to blurt out his feelings “when the gang were around.” He would finish telling her what he had begun to say when Danny and Jerry had interrupted. He was resolved on that point. He was also determined that she should hear him out before she left Severn Beach on her mid-summer trip to Hamilton.
“Can’t you find time to go out in the Oriole with me tomorrow afternoon, Marjorie?” There lurked a trace of stubborn purpose in Hal’s question. “It will be our last sea voyage in the good ship, Oriole, this summer, you know. I suppose you will go from Hamilton back to Sanford.” Hal eyed her almost gloomily.
Marjorie nodded. The two had reached the main entrance of the hotel a trifle ahead of their chums. They now stood waiting at the foot of the wide, ornamental flight of steps which led up to the central veranda of the enormous white stone hotel.
“I’ll try to go for a part of the afternoon, Hal,” she promised, careful to keep reluctance out of her voice. Pinned down to answer directly she had not the stony-heartedness with which Jerry had ticketed her. She could not flatly refuse the invitation of her boy