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He dropped down sidewise on the bench, turned up the lid and dug his fingers into the keyboard. At the noise he evoked from that pampered instrument she did laugh aloud. It was not a piano tuner's arpeggio but a curiously teasing mixed dissonance she couldn't begin to identify. She thought she heard him say, "My God!" but couldn't be sure.

His implement, John's quick eye noticed, was not the long-handled L shaped affair he had always seen tuners use but a T shaped thing that put the tuner's hand exactly above the pin. "It must take an immense amount of strength," he observed, "to tune a piano with a wrench like that." March turned and with a pleasant sort of smile wished him a good morning.

Some makers cover the wrest-plank with a plate of brass; in Broadwood's grands, it is a plate of iron, into which, as well as the wood, the wrest-pins are screwed. The tuner's business is to regulate the tension, by turning the wrest-pins, in which he is chiefly guided by the beats which become audible from differing numbers of vibrations.

"Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort," resumed Camilla, "I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the piano-forte tuner's across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance, and now to be told " Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical as to the formation of new combinations there.

He went inside to the jangling of a player-piano in dire need of a tuner's service, and sat down near the back of the hall with his hat upon his lifted knees which could have used more space between the seats. While they waited for the program they talked in low tones, a mumble of commonplaces.

Her life at Ardkill Cottage was certainly very dull. Memory did but little for her, and she hardly knew how to hope. She would read, till she had nearly learned all their books by heart, and would play such tunes as she knew by the hour together, till the poor instrument, subject to the sea air and away from any tuner's skill, was discordant with its limp strings.