“. . .  The rapture that would be my own
  If I had you . . . if I had you . . . you.”

Piercing sweet it ended, filled with tenderness.  Just you, you, you, going on far across the moon-lit waters into infinity.  Dan walked to the lee of the bridge and with hands on the dodger’s ridge, leaned forward, peering bard and straight to the rim of the sea.

For every heart there is a song, and for every song a heart; for this earth is not so big that the dreams, the passion of some song-maker, humble or not, may not strike a responsive chord, at the other end of the world, it may be.  And this for Dan; this simple love song with its swelling iterations.  It awakened sleeping poetry in the heart of the young commander, awakened a tenderness long hidden under the rough exterior of a tumultuous life.

There was no mistaking the identity of the singer, no mistaking those deep, full notes, vibrant, rounded, and so melodious.  To whom was she singing?  Could a woman sing like that, sing as Miss Howland sang, to no one?  Impersonally?  Dan turned his face down at the group.  The women were muffled in greatcoats, for the soft evening, which had tempted them to the deck, was growing chill, and he could see the dark forms of the men and the red lights of their cigars.  Wotherspoon had just finished a comic song, and they were all laughing and applauding.

Somehow it all emphasized in Dan his aloofness.  He heard Oddington address some jocular remark presumably to Miss Howland, for he caught her laughing reply.  And the thought came, how eminently eligible Oddington was to sit at her side; how fitting that he should be there—­wealthy, distinctly of her set, a good fellow at the university, and now a law partner in the practice which his hard-working father had prepared for him.  For the first time, perhaps, in his life Dan felt himself humbled, and a great wave of bitterness flooded his mind. . . .  And yet Miss Howland had been very kind to him.  Ah, but that was not the point.  He did not want persons to be kind; that suggested charity, or pity.  No; he wanted exactly what he earned—­what he could take with his bare hands and his bare soul.  He wanted equality—­or nothing; and if at the end of his struggle it had to be nothing, all right—­but the end was not yet.

Toward nine o’clock the deck party began to break up.  Some one had suggested bridge, and some opposed the suggestion.  At the end of a laughing discussion Oddington and three others went to the smoking-room, while the rest dispersed in various directions.  Dan, filled with his thoughts, was in the act of lighting his pipe, when the clicking of footfalls and the rustling of skirts sounded on the bridge steps.  The next instant Virginia stood before him.  The moonlight fell upon her, outlining the girl distinctly in her long, blue, double-breasted coat and the wealth of rippling dark hair flowing from under an English yachting cap.  She was smiling.