for her (oh, he didn't play well, atrociously badly
really, but that didn't matter; it only made it all the more exciting) he
made her play for him. Paula smiled reminiscently when she added that he
had sat all the while she was playing, on the bare floor under the piano
where he could feel the vibrations as well as hear them. He had paid her
an odd sort of compliment too, when he came crawling out, saying that he
had assumed from the scores on the piano that she was a singer but that
she played like a musician,--only not a pianist!

He was a genius, absolutely a genius of the first water, when it came to
tuning pianos. Whether his talent as a composer ran to any such lengths
as that she, of course, didn't know. If what he had played for her had
been his own, any of it, it was awfully modern and interesting, at
least. You could tell that even though it kept him swearing at himself
all the time for not being able to play it. And from something he said
at lunch...

"Lunch!" Miss Wollaston gasped (she had been away from home all day). "Do
you mean you had lunch with him?"

"Why not?" Paula wanted to know. "Me to have gone down-stairs and eaten
all alone and had a tray sent up for him? That would have been so silly,
I never even thought of it. He's a real person. I like him a lot. And I
don't know when I've had such a nice day."

Here was where Paula's difficulties began. Because when they asked her
who he was, where he lived, where he came from, what his experiences in
the army had been, and whether he had been to France or not, she had to
profess herself upon all these topics totally uninformed. His name she
happened to know; it was Anthony March. He told her that, somehow,
right at the beginning, though she couldn't remember how the fact had
cropped out.

As to the other matters her husband and his sister were seeking
information about she simply hadn't had time to get around to things like
that. She thought he might have been a farmer once or some such sort of
person. He liked the country anyway. He had spent a lot of time, he told
her, tramping about in Illinois and Iowa, earning his way by tuning
farmers' pianos.

He hated Puccini and spoke rather disrespectfully of Wagner as a
spell-binder. He liked Wolf-Ferrari pretty well; the modern he was really
crazy about was Montemezzi. But he had made her sing oceans of
Gluck,--both the _Iphigenia_ and _Euridice_. It was awfully funny too
because he would sing the othe