he called it a piano and sold it for a piano and I'm expected to come
in and tune it. Slick and smear it over and leave it sounding sicklier
and tubbier and more generally disgusting than ever. You might as well
take a painted harlot off the streets"--he glared at the ornate
extravagance of the case--"and expect to make a gentlewoman of her with
one lesson in deportment. I won't tune it. It's better left as it is. In
its shame."

"Well," said Paula, letting go a long breath, "you've said it."

Then she dropped into a chair and began to laugh. Never again, she felt
sure, would the drawing-room piano be able to cause her a moment's
irritation. This astonishing piano tuner of Lucile's had converted it,
with his new christening, into a source of innocent merriment. "The
painted harlot" covered the ground. Clear inspiration was what that was.
The way he went on glowering at it, digging every now and then a new and
more abominable chord out of its entrails made her mirth the more
uncontrollable.

"It isn't funny, you know, a thing like this," he remonstrated at last.
"It's serious."

"It would be serious," she retorted with sudden severity, "if you had
said all that or anything in the least like that to Miss Wollaston.
Because she really loves it. She has adopted it."

"Was she the lady who spoke to me in the park?" His evident consternation
over this aspect of the case made Paula smile as she nodded yes.

"That was an act of real kindness," he said earnestly. "Not mere good
nature. It doesn't grow on every bush."

To this she eagerly agreed. "She is kind; she's a dear." But when she
saw him looking unhappily at the piano again, she said (for she hadn't
the slightest intention of abandoning him now), "There's another one,
quite a different sort of one, in the music room up-stairs. Would you
like to come along and look at that?"

He followed her tractably enough, but up in her studio before looking at
the piano, he asked her a question or two. Had he the name right? And was
the lady related to Doctor Wollaston?

"She's his sister," said Paula, adding, "and I am his wife. Why, do you
know him?"

"I talked with him once. He came out to the factory to see my father and
I happened to be there. Two or three years ago, that was. He did an
operation on my sister that saved her life. He is a great man." He added,
"My name's Anthony March, but he wouldn't remember me."

He sat down at the instrument, went over the keyboar