de Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot
every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond's piano; and she
had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably
delayed there for the three days that had now passed. Only that morning,
however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a
woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her
approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred
themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case
into a car, and had waited till the train had bumped and jolted off with
it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she
declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in
Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared
already with them.

He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not
do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at
once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in
its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young
girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of
anxiety at its retarded progress.

"And, by-the-way," she added, with the logic of her sex, "I'm just going
to the station to see what's become of a trunk myself that I ordered
expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you're not doing anything this
morning--the tide isn't in till noon, and there'll be little or no
bathing to look at before that--you'd better drive down with me. Or
perhaps you're canoeing up the river with somebody?"

Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential
indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.

"Well, anyway," she said, tangentially, "I can get June Alber to go too,
and you can take her canoeing afterwards."

But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged
to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she
pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she
began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more
sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn
anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning
it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as
combining all the searching effects of a Roentgen-ray examination and the
earlier p