Wollaston concentrated her
attention on the spiggot of the coffee urn) for his head as he bent over
her and pulled it down for a kiss.

"I didn't need any more sleep. I had such a joyous time last night. I
sang the whole of _Maliela_, and a lot of _Thais_. I don't know what all.
Novelli's a marvel; the best accompanist I've found yet. But, oh, my
darling, I did feel such a pig about it."

He was back in his own chair by now and his sister breathed a little
more freely.

"Pig?" he asked.

"Oh, because you weren't there," said Paula. "Because I didn't sing
before, when you asked me to."

"Dearest!" John remonstrated,--pleased though with the apology, you could
see with half an eye,--"it was inexcusable of me to have asked you. It
was a dull crowd from a musical point of view. The only thing I minded
was having, myself, put you into a position where you had to refuse. I am
glad you were able to make it up to yourself after."

"That was not why I didn't," Paula said. She always spoke rather
deliberately and never interrupted any one. "I mean it wasn't because the
others weren't especially musical. But I couldn't have sung without
asking Novelli to play. And he couldn't have refused--being new and a
little on trial you know. And that drawing-room piano, so badly out of
tune, would have been terrible for him. There's no knowing what he
mightn't have done."

John's face beamed triumph. "I might have known you had an unselfish
reason for it," he said. He didn't look at his sister but, of course, the
words slanted her way.

It was perfectly characteristic of Miss Wollaston that she did not,
however, make any immediate attempt to set herself right. She attended
first very competently to all of Paula's wants in the way of breakfast
and saw her fairly launched on her chilled grapefruit. Then she said, "A
man is coming to tune the piano this morning."

It was more than a statement of fact. Indeed I despair of conveying to
you all the implications and moral reflections which Miss Wollaston
contrived to pack into that simple sentence.

The drawing-room piano was what an artillerist would speak of as one of
the sensitive points along the family front. It had been a present to the
Wollaston household from the eldest of John's brothers, the unmarried one
Miss Wollaston had kept house for so many years before he died; the last
present, it turned out, he ever made to anybody. Partly perhaps, because
it was a sacred object, th