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 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.”

Here was where Paula’s difficulties began.  Because when they asked her who he was, where he lived, where he came from, what his experiences in the army had been, and whether he had been to France or not, she had to profess herself upon all these topics totally uninformed.  His name she happened to know; it was Anthony March.  He told her that, somehow, right at the beginning, though she couldn’t remember how the fact had cropped out.

As to the other matters her husband and his sister were seeking information about she simply hadn’t had time to get around to things like that.  She thought he might have been a farmer once or some such sort of person.  He liked the country anyway.  He had spent a lot of time, he told her, tramping about in Illinois and Iowa, earning his way by tuning farmers’ pianos.