It was at her half-humorous suggestion that he went back, presently, to work at the piano.  She settled contentedly near him where with an outstretched hand she could occasionally respond to his touch.  They hadn’t, either of them, very much to say.

Once the work was interrupted, when he asked, rather tensely, “Do you want me to come to Ravinia?”

She found herself at a loss for a categorical reply.  She’d have thought that a whole-hearted yes would have been the only thing she could say.

“I don’t want you—­tortured any more with unheard melodies,” she answered after a moment’s reflection.

His nod, decisive as it was, struck her as equivocal.  But she was too happy to probe into anything this afternoon.  There would be plenty of time; unstinted hours.  It was with no more than a mild regret that she heard, under the windows, the return of the big car with Aunt Lucile.  This inextinguishable happiness expressed itself in the touch of impudent mischief with which she slipped up close behind Anthony March and, in the last possible instant before her aunt’s entrance into the room, bent down and kissed him; then flashed back to her decorously distant chair.

It was funny how calm she was.  This day that was closing down over the hill behind the apple house couldn’t be, it seemed, the same that had dawned over the lake at Ravinia.  The whole Ravinia episode, even as she told Lucile and March about it, seemed remote, like something out of a book; but became for that very reason, rather pleasant to dwell upon.  Sylvia came in pretty soon for a critical survey of what March had accomplished with the piano, volunteered to help and attempted to.  But having pled some of Anthony’s arrangements of loose parts, she was sacked off the job and sent back to the hay field to bring the boys in for supper.

After supper the excitement over the piano increased.  They all gathered round March like people watching a conjurer’s trick when he slid the action into place and proved, chromatically, that every hammer would strike and every key return.

“But it isn’t tuned at all,” Sylvia wailed.  “It will be hours before you can play on it.”

“Minutes,” March corrected with a grin.  And they watched, amazed,—­but less so really than an ordinary piano tuner would have been,—­at the way he caught octaves, fifths and fourths, sixths and thirds up and down that keyboard like a juggler keeping seven tennis balls in the air.

“There you are,” he said suddenly, before it seemed that he could be half-way through and began playing a dance.

“But you can play tunes!” cried Sylvia.  “I thought you only did terribly high-brow things.  That’s what Rush said.”

“I was pianist in the best jazz orchestra in Bordeaux,” March told her.

He stayed there at the piano quite contentedly for more than an hour.  Some of the musical jokes he indulged in (his sense of humor expressed itself more easily and impudently in musical terms than in any other) were rather over his auditors’ heads.  Parodies whose originals they failed to recognize, experiments in the whole-tone scale that would have interested disciples of Debussy, but his rhythms they understood and recognized as faultless.