hoir-wise to sing
hymns for which one of the Cantrell sisters went to the piano beyond the
open windows of the drawing-room to play the accompaniments.

When the not too harmonious chorus began to drone upon the windless
night air, Miss Craigmiles came out of her fit of abstraction and
thanked Bigelow for his patience with her.

"It isn't altogether morbid curiosity on my part," she explained, half
pathetically. "Some day I may be able to tell you just what it is--but
not to-night. Now you may go and rescue Madge from the major, who has
been 'H'm-ha-ing' her to extinction for the last half-hour. And if
you're brave enough you may tell Mr. Ballard that his bass is something
dreadful--or send him here and I'll tell him."

The open-eyed little ruse worked like a piece of well-oiled mechanism,
and Ballard broke off in the middle of a verse to go and drag Bigelow's
deserted chair to within murmuring distance of the hammock.

"You were singing frightfully out of tune," she began, in mock
petulance. "Didn't you know it?"

"I took it for granted," he admitted, cheerfully. "I was never known to
sing any other way. My musical education has been sadly neglected."

She looked up with the alert little side turn of the head that always
betokened a shifting of moods or of mind scenery.

"Mr. Bromley's hasn't," she averred. "He sings well, and plays the
violin like a master. Doesn't he ever play for you?"

Ballard recalled, with a singular and quite unaccountable pricking of
impatience, that once before, when the conditions were curiously
similar, she had purposefully turned the conversation upon Bromley. But
he kept the impatience out of his reply.

"No; as a matter of fact, we have seen very little of each other since I
came on the work."

"He is a dear boy." She said it with the exact shade of impersonality
which placed Bromley on the footing of a kinsman of the blood; but
Ballard's handicap was still distorting his point of view.

"I am glad you like him," he said; his tone implying the precise
opposite of the words.

"Are you? You don't say it very enthusiastically."

It was a small challenge, and he lifted it almost roughly.

"I can't be enthusiastic where your liking for other men is concerned."

Her smile was a mere face-lighting of mockery.

"I can't imagine Mr. Bromley saying a thing like that. What was it you
told me once about the high plane of men-friendships? As I remember it,
you said that they were th