By Beatrice Harraden
It was about four in the afternoon when a young girl came into the salon of the
little hotel at C—— in Switzerland, and drew her chair up to the fire.
"You are soaked through," said an elderly lady, who was herself trying to get
roasted. "You ought to lose no time in changing your clothes."
"I have not anything to change," said the young girl, laughing. "Oh, I shall soon
be dry!"
"Have you lost all your luggage?" asked the lady, sympathetically.
"No," said the young girl; "I had none to lose." And she smiled a little
mischievously, as though she knew by instinct that her companion's sympathy
would at once degenerate into suspicion!
"I don't mean to say that I have not a knapsack," she added, considerately. "I
have walked a long distance—in fact, from Z——."
"And where did you leave your companions?" asked the lady, with a touch of
forgiveness in her voice.
"I am without companions, just as I am without luggage," laughed the girl.
And then she opened the piano, and struck a few notes. There was something
caressing in the way in which she touched the keys; whoever she was, she knew
how to make sweet music; sad music, too, full of that undefinable longing, like
the holding out of one's arms to one's friends in the hopeless distance.
The lady bending over the fire looked up at the little girl, and forgot that she had
brought neither friends nor luggage with her. She hesitated for one moment, and
then she took the childish face between her hands and kissed it.
"Thank you, dear, for your music," she said, gently.
"The piano is terribly out of tune," said the little girl, suddenly; and she ran out of
the room, and came back carrying her knapsack.
"What are you going to do?" asked her companion.
"I am going to tune the piano," the little girl said; and she took a tuning-hammer
out of her knapsack, and began her work in real earnest. She evidently knew
what she was about, and pegged away at the notes as though her whole life
depended upon the result.
The lady by the fire was lost in amazement. Who could she be? Without luggage
and without friends, and with a tuning-hammer!
Meanwhile one of the gentlemen had strolled into the salon; but hearing the
sound of tuning, and being in secret possession of nerves, he fled, saying, "The
tuner, by Jove!"
A few minutes afterward Miss Blake, whose nerves were no secret possession,
hastened into the salon, and, in her usual imperious fashion, demanded instant
silence.
"I have just done," said the little girl. "The piano was so terribly out of tune, I
could not resist the temptation."
Miss Blake, who never listened to what any one said, took it for granted that the
little girl was the tuner for whom M. le Proprietaire had promised to send; and
