about it, but now they should see they were mistaken. It was like
unveiling a statue. The poor thing had been there all the time, covered
up so that you couldn't hear it. She was so excited about it she could
hardly leave it alone.

And he had been as delighted with the results as she herself. After he
had played it a while for her (oh, he didn't play well, atrociously badly
really, but that didn't matter; it only made it all the more exciting) he
made her play for him. Paula smiled reminiscently when she added that he
had sat all the while she was playing, on the bare floor under the piano
where he could feel the vibrations as well as hear them. He had paid her
an odd sort of compliment too, when he came crawling out, saying that he
had assumed from the scores on the piano that she was a singer but that
she played like a musician,--only not a pianist!

He was a genius, absolutely a genius of the first water, when it came to
tuning pianos. Whether his talent as a composer ran to any such lengths
as that she, of course, didn't know. If what he had played for her had
been his own, any of it, it was awfully modern and interesting, at
least. You could tell that even though it kept him swearing at himself
all the time for not being able to play it. And from something he said
at lunch...

"Lunch!" Miss Wollaston gasped (she had been away from home all day). "Do
you mean you had lunch with him?"

"Why not?" Paula wanted to know. "Me to have gone down-stairs and eaten
all alone and had a tray sent up for him? That would have been so silly,
I never even thought of it. He's a real person. I like him a lot. And I
don't know when I've had such a nice day."