esult of his labours with evident satisfaction.

"It looks like a bookcase," said William Clodd. "You might sit in the
room for half an hour and never know it wasn't a bookcase."

What William Clodd had accomplished was this: he had had prepared, after
his own design, what appeared to be four shelves laden with works
suggestive of thought and erudition. As a matter of fact, it was not a
bookcase, but merely a flat board, the books merely the backs of volumes
that had long since found their way into the paper-mill. This artful
deception William Clodd had screwed upon a cottage piano standing in the
corner of the editorial office of _Good Humour_. Half a dozen real
volumes piled upon the top of the piano completed the illusion. As
William Clodd had proudly remarked, a casual visitor might easily have
been deceived.

"If you had to sit in the room while she was practising mixed scales,
you'd be quickly undeceived," said the editor of _Good Humour_, one Peter
Hope. He spoke bitterly.

"You are not always in," explained Clodd. "There must be hours when she
is here alone, with nothing else to do. Besides, you will get used to it
after a while."

"You, I notice, don't try to get used to it," snarled Peter Hope. "You
always go out the moment she commences."

"A friend of mine," continued William Clodd, "worked in an office over a
piano-shop for seven years, and when the shop closed, it nearly ruined
his business; couldn't settle down to work for want of it."

"Why doesn't he come here?" asked Peter Hope. "The floor above is
vacant."

"Can't," explained William Clodd. "He's dead."

"I can quite believe it," commented Peter Hope.

"It was a shop where people came and practised, paying sixpence an hour,
and he had got to like it--said it made a cheerful background to his
thoughts. Wonderful what you can get accustomed to."

"What's the good of it?" demanded Peter Hope.

"What's the good of it!" retorted William Clodd indignantly. "Every girl
ought to know how to play the piano. A nice thing if when her lover asks
her to play something to him--"

"I wonder you don't start a matrimonial agency," sneered Peter Hope.
"Love and marriage--you think of nothing else."

"When you are bringing up a young girl--" argued Clodd.

"But you're not," interrupted Peter; "that's just what I'm trying to get
out of your head. It is I who am bringing her up. And between
ourselves, I wish you wouldn't interfere so much