topped to listen you
would have known. You ought to hear my kid brother play though. He's
a corker."

"But I did listen," she insisted, ignoring the reference to his "kid
brother." "I stood there a long time and I thought it beautiful. What
was that last selection?"

He flushed guiltily.

"It was--oh, just a little thing I sort of put together myself," he
told her.

"How delightful! And so you compose, too?"

"Not at all," he hastily assured her. "This is the only thing, and it
seemed to come just sort of naturally to me from time to time. I don't
suppose it's finished yet, because I never play it exactly as I did
before. I always seem to add a little bit to it. I do wish that I had
had time to know more of music. What little I play I learned from a
pianola."

"A what?" she gasped.

He laughed in a half-embarrassed way.

"A pianola," he repeated. "You see I've always been hungry for music,
and while my kid brother was still in college I began to be able to
afford things, and one of the first luxuries was a pianola. You know
the machine has a little lever which throws the keys in or out of
engagement, so that you can play it as a regular piano if you wish, and
if you leave the keys engaged while you are playing the rolls, they
work up and down; so by watching these I gradually learned to pick out
my favorite tunes by hand. I couldn't play them so well by myself as
the rolls played them, but somehow or other they gave me more
satisfaction."

Miss Stevens did not laugh. In some indefinable way all this made a
difference in Sam Turner--a considerable difference--and she felt quite
justified in having deliberately come to the conclusion that she had
been "mean" to him; in having deliberately slipped away from the others
as they were all going over to the bowling alleys; in having come back
deliberately to find him.

"Your favorite tunes," she repeated musingly. "What was the first one,
I wonder? One of those that you have just been playing?"

"The first one?" he returned with a smile. "No, it was a sort of
rag-time jingle. I thought it very pretty then, but I played it over
the other day, the first time in years, and I didn't seem to like it at
all. In fact, I wonder how I ever did like it."

Rag-time! And now, left entirely to his own devices and for his own
pleasure, he was playing Chopin! Yes, it made quite a difference in
Sam Turner. She was glad that she had decided to wear his ros