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.