"It is a dreadful noise, though, isn't it?" Naomi had observed more than once.
"It is so," Tom Chester would answer, with a smile and another puff.
"He made such a point of setting to work this morning, you know, and it's so good of him to work on Sunday. I don't see how we can stop him."
Then Naomi would sit silent, but not reading, and would presently announce that she had counted the striking of that note twenty-nine times in succession. Once she made it sixty-six; but the piano-tuner behind the closed door had broken his own record, and seemed in a fair way of hammering out the same note a hundred times running, when Monty Gilroy came tramping along the veranda with blinking yellow eyelashes, and his red face pale with temper. Miss Pryse was keeping tally aloud when the manager blundered upon the scene.
"I say, Naomi, how long is this to go on?" exclaimed Gilroy, in a tone that was half-complaining, half-injured, but wholly different from that which he had employed toward her the night before.
"Eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five," counted Naomi, giving him a nod and a smile.
"I hadn't been asleep ten minutes when he awoke me with his infernal din."
"Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three——"
"It's no joke when a man has been over the board the whole week," said Gilroy, trying to smile nevertheless.
"Ninety-seven, ninety-eight—well, I'll be jiggered!"