Mary Wollaston | Page 6

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 of her passion for good works. But Paula,
he knew, would just as soon have invited a strange bench-warming
dentist to come and work on her teeth by way of being kind to him.
Miss Wollaston, a flush of annoyance on her faded cheeks, began
making dignified preparations to leave the table and John hastily
apologized. "I laughed," he said,--disingenuously because it wouldn't
do to implicate Paula--"over the idea that perhaps he didn't want a job
at all and made up on the spur of the moment the unlikeliest trade he

could think of. And how surprised he must have been when you took
him up."
"He did not seem surprised," Miss Wollaston said. "He thanked me
very nicely and said he would come this morning. At ten, if that would
be convenient. Of course if you wish to put it off...."
"Not at all," said John. He rose when she did and--this was an extra bit,
an act of contrition for having wounded her--went with her to the door.
"It was a good idea," he said; "an excellent way of--of killing two birds
with one stone."
Paula was smiling over this when he came back to her. "It doesn't
matter, does it?" he asked.
She shook her head. "It isn't that it's out of tune, really; it's
just--hopeless."
It was strange how like a knife thrust that word of hers--hopeless--went
through him. Perfectly illogical, of course; she was not speaking of his
life and hers but of that ridiculous drawing-room piano. Somehow the
mere glow she had brought into the room with her, the afterglow of an
experience he had no share in producing, had become painful to him;
made him feel old. He averted his eyes from her with an effort and
stared down at his empty plate.
A moment later she came around the table and seated herself, facing
him, upon the arm of his chair; clasped his neck with her two hands.
"You're tired," she said. "How much sleep did you have last night?"
And on his admitting that he hadn't had any, she exclaimed against his
working himself to death like that.
No memory, though he made a conscious effort to recover it, of his
audacious success during the small hours of that morning in bringing
triumphantly into the world the small new life that Pollard would have
destroyed, came back to fortify him; no trace of his own afterglow that
had so fascinated and alarmed his sister. "I shall sleep fast for an hour
or two this morning and make it up," he told Paula.

"I do wish you might have been there last night," she said after a little
silence. "I don't believe I've ever sung so well;--could have, at least, if
there had been room enough to turn around in. It was all there; it's
getting bigger all the time. Not just the voice, if you know what I mean,
darling, but what I could do with it."
"It was partly Novelli, I suspect," he said. "Having him