red appreciably about it from the beginning, but
neither of the others paid any attention to that.

As it fell out, John might have spared his labors because at eight
o'clock or thereabouts the next morning just as he was sitting down to
breakfast, Anthony March came back to repair his omission of the day
before and tune the drawing-room piano.

A minor domestic detail of that sort would normally have fallen within
Lucile's province, but John decisively took it away from her.

"When I finish breakfast," he said, "I'll write him a check and take it
in to him." He added, "I'm curious to see what this new discovery of
Paula's looks like."

That was exactly what he felt, an amused comfortable curiosity. Nothing
in the least like that flash of jealousy he had felt over Novelli. If it
had occurred to him to try to explain the difference to himself and had
he taken the trouble to skim off the superficial explanation,--that
Portia Stanton's husband belonged in Paula's world and that a tramp
genius who came around to tune pianos did not,--he might have got down to
the recognition of the fact that the character Paula had sketched for him
last night was a grotesque and not therefore to be taken seriously. You
could not, at least, do anything but smile over a man who sat on the
floor under Paula's piano while she played and came crawling out to
express surprise that a singer should be a musician as well.

So the look of the man he found in the drawing-room stopped him rather
short. Anthony March had taken off the ill-fitting khaki blouse and the
sleeves of his olive-drab uniform shirt were rolled up above the elbows.
He was sitting sidewise on the piano bench, his left hand on the
keyboard, his right making imperceptible changes in the tension of one of
the strings. His implement, John's quick eye noticed, was not the
long-handled L shaped affair he had always seen tuners use but a T shaped
thing that put the tuner's hand exactly above the pin.

"It must take an immense amount of strength," he observed, "to tune a
piano with a wrench like that."

March turned and with a pleasant sort of smile wished him a good morning.
But he finished ironing the wave out of a faulty unison before he replied
to John's remark. He arose from the bench as he spoke. "It does; but it
is more a matter of knack really. A great tuner named Clark taught me,
and he learned it from Jonas Chickering himself. Old Jonas wouldn't allow
any of his grand pia