e Wollaston children took to treating it rather
irreverently. The "Circassian grand" was one of its nicknames and the
"Siamese Elephant" another. It did glare in the otherwise old-fashioned
Dearborn Avenue drawing-room and its case did express a complete
recklessness of expense rather than any more austere esthetic impulse.

Paula ignored it in rather a pointed way; being a musician she might have
been expected to see that it was kept in tune. She had a piano of her own
up in the big room at the top of the house that had once been the nursery
and over this instrument, she made, Miss Wollaston felt, a silly amount
of fuss. Supposedly expert tuners were constantly being called in to do
things to it and nothing they did ever seemed to afford Paula any
satisfaction.

The aura that surrounded Miss Wollaston's remark included, then, the
conviction that the drawing-room piano, being a sacred memory, couldn't
be out of tune in the first place; that Paula, in the second, ought to
have attended to it; and third (this is rather complex but I guarantee
the accuracy of it) the fact that it was to be tuned this morning, really
made it a perfectly possible instrument for Mr. Novelli to have played
upon last night.

John missed none of that. He hadn't been observing his sister during half
a century for nothing. He glanced over to see how much of it his wife
took in; but the fact, in this instance, was all that interested Paula.

"It was awfully clever of you," she said, "to get hold of a tuner. Who is
he? Where did you find him?"

"I found him in the park," said Miss Wollaston brightly, responding to
the little thrill you always felt when Paula focused her attention upon
you. "He was sitting on a bench when I drove by just after lunch. I don't
know why I noticed him but I did and when I came back hours later, he was
still sitting there on the same bench. He was in uniform; a private, I
think, certainly not an officer. It struck me as rather sad, his sitting
there like that, so I stopped the car and spoke to him. He got his
discharge just the other day, it seemed. I asked him if he had a job and
he said, no, he didn't believe he had. Then I asked him what his trade
was and he said he was a piano tuner. So I told him he might come this
morning and tune ours."

It was Paula's bewildered stare that touched off John's peal of laughter.
Alone with his sister he might have smiled to himself over the lengths
she went in the satisfaction