Mary Wollaston | Page 9

sounding sicklier and tubbier and more generally disgusting than ever. You might as well take a painted harlot off the streets"--he glared at the ornate extravagance of the case--"and expect to make a gentlewoman of her with one lesson in deportment. I won't tune it. It's better left as it is. In its shame."
"Well," said Paula, letting go a long breath, "you've said it."
Then she dropped into a chair and began to laugh. Never again, she felt sure, would the drawing-room piano be able to cause her a moment's irritation. This astonishing piano tuner of Lucile's had converted it, with his new christening, into a source of innocent merriment. "The painted harlot" covered the ground. Clear inspiration was what that was. The way he went on glowering at it, digging every now and then a new and more abominable chord out of its entrails made her mirth the more uncontrollable.
"It isn't funny, you know, a thing like this," he remonstrated at last. "It's serious."
"It would be serious," she retorted with sudden severity, "if you had said all that or anything in the least like that to Miss Wollaston. Because she really loves it. She has adopted it."
"Was she the lady who spoke to me in the park?" His evident consternation over this aspect of the case made Paula smile as she nodded yes.
"That was an act of real kindness," he said earnestly. "Not mere good nature. It doesn't grow on every bush."
To this she eagerly agreed. "She is kind; she's a dear." But when she saw him looking unhappily at the piano again, she said (for she hadn't the slightest intention of abandoning him now), "There's another one, quite a different sort of one, in the music room up-stairs. Would you like to come along and look at that?"
He followed her tractably enough, but up in her studio before looking at the piano, he asked her a question or two. Had he the name right? And was the lady related to Doctor Wollaston?
"She's his sister," said Paula, adding, "and I am his wife. Why, do you know him?"
"I talked with him once. He came out to the factory to see my father and I happened to be there. Two or three years ago, that was. He did an operation on my sister that saved her life. He is a great man." He added, "My name's Anthony March, but he wouldn't remember me."
He sat down at the instrument, went over the keyboard from bottom, to top and back again with a series of curious modulations. Then opening his bag and beginning to get out his tools, he said, "Before I went into the army, there was a man named Bernstein in these parts, who used to perpetrate outrages like this on pianos."
"Yes," said Paula, "he tuned this one two weeks ago."
Without so much as a by your leave, Anthony March went to work.
It was Paula's childlike way to take any pleasurable event simply as a gift from heaven without any further scrutiny of its source; with no labored attempt to explain its arrival and certainly with no misgivings as to whether or not she was entitled to it. Anthony March was such a gift. By the time he had got to work on her own piano, she knew he was pure gold and settled down joyously to make the most of him.
It was not until she attempted to give an account to the Wollastons at dinner that night, of the day they had spent together--for they had made a day of it--that she realized there was anything odd, not to say astonishing, about the episode. How in the first place did it happen that it was Paula's piano he tuned instead of the one in the drawing-room? This was, of course, inexplicable until she could get John by himself and tell him about it. One couldn't report to Lucile his phrase about the painted harlot. She had to content herself with stressing the fact that he intended to tune the drawing-room piano after he had finished with hers and then somehow he hadn't got around to it.
But why had an unaccredited wanderer whom Lucile had found in the park even been given a chance at the piano up-stairs? Well, he had looked to Paula like an artist when she had let him in the door. You could tell, with people like that, if you had an eye for such matters. And then his recognition of Bernstein's nefarious handiwork had clenched her conviction. Certainly she had been right about it; he had absolutely bewitched that piano of hers. She didn't believe there was another such tuner in the United States. If they would come up-stairs after dinner, she'd show them. They had always thought she was unnecessarily fussy about it, but now