Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/154

 I instantly clapped my pipe in my pocket, where it revenged itself on me for neglecting to put it out by burning a hole through to my skin. I apologised, and would have taken my humble chauffeury self away, but my mistress detained me. "What is that wonderful, faraway sound, Brown?" she asked in the delicious way she has of expecting me to know everything, as if I were an encyclopædia and she'd only to turn over my leaves to come to a new fact.

I stopped breathing to listen; I'd do it permanently to please her. And there was a sound—a wonderful sound. If I hadn't been thinking about her and the stars, I should have been conscious of it before. Out of the night-silence the sound seemed to grow, and yet be a part of the silence, or rather, to intensify the near silence by its distant booming, deep and ominous, like the far-off roaring of angry lions never pacified. At first I thought it must be a rush of wind surging through the mighty pine forest; but not a dark branch moved against the spangled embroidery of stars, though the air seemed faintly to vibrate with the continuous, solemn note. Suddenly the meaning of the sound came to me; it was the majestic music of the Atlantic surf beating on the bar ten miles away. But it was too divine standing there in the night with Her in silence. For a moment I had not the heart to speak and tell her of my discovery. A faint light came to us from the stars and from the curtained windows of the hotel. I could just see her face and her lovely great eyes looking up questioningly in absolute confidence at me. Jove, what wouldn't I have given just then