"I'm twenty-one," conceded the girl. 74
"Well, she's fifty," affirmed the Young Doctor.
Across the girl's translucent face a dozen conflicting emotions seemed surging suddenly. "So?" she laughed. "So?" she repeated experimentally, "If only you had not been so—so bad," she sighed. "Well, about that piano," she ventured with a certain unwonted shyness. "In a world of so much racket is it not a pity that any harmonies should lie dumb? Is it—is it a good piano?" she asked quite abruptly.
"Why, for heaven's sake, how do I know?" demanded the Young Doctor. "It may be a—a Stradivarius!" he floundered wildly. "But it looks to me like the—like the devil!"
"If I could only see it," whispered the girl, "I could tell in a minute of course."
"If you could only see it?" scoffed the Young Doctor. Then, "Well—well—why not?" he acknowledged a trifle tardily, but with indisputable common sense.
"I have an aunt here," mused the girl, "who has a rheumatism in her elbow, I think it is. On Friday afternoon next—if the rheumatism perhaps should be sufficiently 75bad?" Flushed with the anticipatory ardor of a musician she lifted her eyes to his.
"Why, capital!" acquiesced the Young Doctor. For the instant the whole suggestion struck him as being extraordinarily apt. "Well, good-by then," he laughed, "until Friday afternoon!" And vanished into the night.
He was still a long, cold distance from home. But by the time he had finally reached there his pulses were ringing with fire rather than with frost. And as soon as he had started a bright roaring flame in his stove, and concocted for himself a most luscious and steamsome drink, and driven his frosted toes into the farthest corners of some moth-eaten old fur slippers, he sat right down in a great spirit of diablerie to tell Mrs. Tome Gallien just what he thought of her.
"I hope you're satisfied!" he began quite abruptly in a firm and emphatic black hand writing. "Driven out into the winter streets by your most charming gift, I have in four short hours walked eleven miles; supped in a conspicuous restaurant with a perfectly 76strange girl and at her expense; been branded publicly for all time, first as the girl's beau and later as her husband and the father of certain imaginary children; and have also in due time, still included in the original four hours, you understand, kissed said girl 'Good- night' on her own doorstep in the full glare of a city electric light,—and am now at ten-thirty P. M. of the aforesaid Monday evening waiting patiently in my room until Friday afternoon next when, heavily chaperoned by some kind of a relative with rheumatism, the said Adventure will appear to investigate the piano—and myself.