"I will
find out what she is made of," thought Reyburn. "Are you made of
clay?" he said boldly.
"He shall find that there is fire in my clay," said Helen to herself
as she appeared not to heed his look or his words.
And there it began. And swift and sudden it went on to the end. She
had come on board the yacht that first night to startle it with her
beauty and her voice; last night, silent and stately, she had slipped
through the evening like a dream; now she stood before him a dazzling
creature of the morning: yesterday she was Penseroso; to-day she was
Allegro; what would she be to-morrow? How sparkling, as one day
followed another, her gayety was! and yet with no shallow sparkle:
there was always the shadow of still depths just beyond--seasons of
silence, moments of half sadness, times when he had to wonder whither
her thoughts had led her. She sang a little song of the muleteers on
the mountains, that he admired; then she must teach it to him, she
said; they sang the song together, their voices lingering on the same
note, rising in the same breath, falling in the same cadence. He had a
sonorous tenor of his own: more than once she caught herself pausing
in her part to hear it. How soft, and yet how strong, was the language
of the song! he said; he must learn Spanish, she replied; and they
hung together over the same book, and he repeated the phrase that fell
from her lips--an apt pupil, it may be, for more than once the phrase,
as he uttered it, deepened the color on her cheek.
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