So music, with all its wooing, its invitation, its challenge, its best appeal, for a time filled and thrilled this strange auditorium, until forsooth later comers might, as was the story, indeed have found jewels caught there in the chinks of the rude-hewn walls.
All at once the voice of the artist, the subsidiary voice of the piano broke, dropped, and paused.

And then, with no more interlude, that great instrument, a perfect human voice, in the throat of a perfect human woman, swept gently into the melody of the old song of "Annie Laurie." At the beginning of it there was a schoolgirl of Georgia, and a freighter of the Plains, and at the end of it there was a woman with bowed head, and a man silent, whose head also was bowed.
Neither of the two in the great room heard the footfalls of one who approached in the dusk across the puncheon floor of the wide gallery.
Dan Andersen, for reasons of his own, had also come on up the trail to the hotel.

Perhaps he intended to make certain inquiries; but he never got even so far as the door.

The voice of Donatelli caught and held him as it had her other auditor.

He stopped midway of the gallery, listened to the very last note, then turned and quietly stole away, returning to the lonely bivouac beneath the pines.