rocedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which
he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.

He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis
Desmond's piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when
he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been
put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He
passed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing
with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.

"Why, look here!" he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased
overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its
cover, "what's that piano doing _here_?"

The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this
demand, and responded mildly, "Well, that's just what I was thinking
myself."

"That piano," Gaites went on with unabated violence, "started from
Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it's been
lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower
Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in
Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent
Harbor Saturday morning!"

The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites's figure warily, as if it might
be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of
dreamy suggestion: "Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers
Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth."

Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the
express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the
passenger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.

"Just look at this, Mrs. Maze," said Gaites when she drew near enough to
read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked
at Gaites's face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and
then she looked back at the piano-case.

"No!" she exclaimed and questioned in one.

Gaites nodded confirmation.

"Then it won't be there in time for the poor thing's birthday?"

He nodded again.

Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because
there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because
in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.

"Well, it's an abominable outrage!" she began. She added: "It's a
burning shame! They'll never get over i