“Come!” she said at last, giving two slender arms a squeeze. “Come, we must go in. Tomorrow is another day.”
“It’s a phantom, a phantom of the air!” Body aquiver, her black eyes reflecting the light of the setting sun, Greta stood intent, listening with all her ears.
A moment before she had been hearing only the goodnight song and twitter of birds. Strange sounds they were to her. Bird songs all the same. But now this. “It is celestial music from heaven!” she whispered. Yet as she thought it, she knew that was not true. A musician herself, she had recognized at once the notes of a violin.
The sound came from afar. At times a light breeze carried it quite away.
“May be miles away. In this still air sound carries far. But where can that one be who plays so divinely?”
To this question she could find no answer. She was standing on a narrow, natural platform of stone. Before her, almost straight down two hundred feet, were the black waters of Duncan’s Bay. Miles away, with ridges, tangled jungles and deep ravines between, was the nearest settlement.
She had climbed all the way up Greenstone Ridge from the shore of Duncan’s Bay that she might be alone, that she might think. She was not thinking now. She was listening to such music as one is seldom privileged to hear.
Yes, she had climbed all that way through the bush that she might think. Greta was an only child. This was her first long journey away from home and mother. Tears had stood in her mother’s eyes as she bade her goodby, yet she had said bravely enough, “You must go, Greta. The doctor says you will escape from the poison of ragweed. I cannot come with you. You will be safe and happy with Jeanne and Florence. Goodby, and God bless you!”
There were times when this dark-eyed child recalled those words, when great waves of longing swept over her, when her shoulders drooped and all her body was aquiver. At such times as these she wanted nothing so much as to be alone.
As she had stepped into the still shadows of the evergreen forest at the back of the camping ground on Duncan’s Bay that afternoon, she had been caught in such a wave of homesickness as would seem for the moment must sweep away her very soul.
“Florence!” she had called, and there was despair in her heart. “Florence, I am going to climb the ridge. You and Jeanne go on. I have my flashlight. I—I’ll be back after the sun has set.”