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.