style="font-size:15px;"> 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!"
"Ninety-eight it is," said Tom Chester.
"Yes, he's changed the note. He might have given it a couple more! Still, it's the record. Now, Monty, please forgive us; we're trying to make the best of a bad job, as you see."
"It is a bad job," assented Gilroy, whose rueful countenance concealed (but not from the girl) a vile temper smouldering. "It's pretty rough, I think, on us chaps who've been working like Kanakas all the week."
"Well, but you were pretty rough upon poor Mr. Engelhardt last night; so don't you think that it serves you quite right?"
"Poor Mr. Engelhardt!" echoed Gilroy, savagely. "So it serves us right, does it?" He forced a laugh. "What do you say, Tom?"
"I think it serves you right, too," answered Tom Chester, coolly.
Gilroy laughed again.
"So you're crackin', old chap," said he, genially. He generally was genial with Tom Chester, for whom he entertained a hatred enhanced by fear. "But I say, Naomi, need this sort of thing go on all the afternoon?"
"If it doesn't he will have to stay till to-morrow."
"Ah! I see."
"I thought you would. The piano was in a bad way, and he said there was a long day's work in it; but he seems anxious to get away this evening, that's why he began before breakfast."
"Then let him stick to it, by all means, and we'll all clear out together. I'll see that his horse is run up—I'll go now."
He went.
"That's the most jealous gentleman in this colony," said Naomi to her companion. "He'd rather suffer anything than leave this little piano-tuner and me alone together!"
"Poor little chap," said Chester of the musician; he had nothing to say about Gilroy, who was still in view from the veranda, a swaggering figure in the strong sunlight, with his hands in his cross-cut breeches' pockets, his elbows sticking out, and the strut of a cock on its own midden. Tom Chester watched him with a hard light in his clear eye, and a moistening of the palms of his hands. Tom was pretty good with his fists, and for many a weary month he had been spoiling for a fight with Monty Gilroy, who very likely was not the only jealous gentleman on Taroomba.
All this time the piano-tuner was at his fiendish work behind the closed door, over which Naomi Pryse had purposely mounted guard. Distracting repetitions of one note were varied only by depressing octaves and irritating thirds. Occasionally a chord or two promised a trial trip over the keys, but such promises were never fulfilled. At last Naomi shut her book, with a hopeless smile at Tom Chester, who was ready for her with an answering grin.
"Really, I can't stand it any longer, Mr. Chester."
"You have borne it like a man, Miss Pryse."
"I wanted to make sure that nobody bothered him. Do you think we may safely leave him now?"
"Quite safely. Gilroy is up at the yards, and Sanderson only plays the fool to an audience. Let me pull you out of your chair."
"Thanks. That's it. Let us stroll up to the horse-paddock gate and back; then it will be time for tea; and let's hope our little tuner will have finished his work at last."
"I believe he has finished now," Tom Chester said, as they turned their backs on the homestead. "He's never run up and down the board like that before."
"The board!" said Miss Pryse, laughing. "No, don't you believe it; he won't finish for another hour."
Tom Chester was right, however. As Naomi and he passed out of earshot, the piano-tuner faced about on the music-stool, and peered wistfully through the empty room at the closed door, straining his ear for their voices. Of course he heard nothing; but the talking on the veranda had never been continuous, so that did not surprise him. It gladdened him, rather. She was reading. She might be alone; his heart beat quicker for the thought. She had sat there all day, of her own kind will, enduring his melancholy performance; now she should have her reward. His eyes glistened as he searched in his memory for some restful, dreamy melody, which should at once soothe and charm her ears aching from his crude unmusical monotonies. Suddenly he rubbed his hands, and then stretching them out and leaning backward on the stool he let his fingers fall with their lightest and daintiest touch upon Naomi's old piano.
He had chosen a very simple, well-known piece; but it need not be so well known in the bush. Miss Pryse might never have heard it before, in which case she could not fail to be enchanted. It was the "Schlummerlied" of Schumann, and the piano-tuner played it with all the very considerable feeling and refinement of which he was capable, and with a smile all the time for its exceeding appropriateness. What could chime more truly with the lazy stillness of the Sunday afternoon than this sweet, bewitching lullaby? Engelhardt had always loved it; but never in his life had he played it half so well. As he finished—softly, but not so softly as to risk a single note dropping short of the veranda—he wheeled round again with a sudden self-conscious movement. It was as though he expected to find the door open and Naomi entranced upon the threshold. It is a fact that he sat watching the door-handle to see it turn, first with eagerness, and at last with acute disappointment. His disappointment was no greater when he opened the door himself and saw the book lying in the empty chair. That, indeed, was a relief. To find her sitting there unmoved was what his soul had dreaded.
But now that his work was done, the piano-tuner felt very lonely and unhappy. To escape from these men with whom he could not get on was his strongest desire but one; the other was to stay and see more of the glorious girl who had befriended him; and he was torn between the two, because his longing for love was scarcely more innate than his shrinking from ridicule and scorn. He knew this, too, and had as profound a scorn for himself as any he was likely to meet with from another. His saving grace was the moral courage which enabled him to run counter to his own craven inclinations.
Thus in the early morning he had apologized to Sanderson, the store-keeper, for the loss of his temper overnight; after lying awake for hours chewing the bitterness of this humiliating move, he had determined upon it in the end. But determination was what he had—it takes not a little to bring you to apologize in cold blood to a rougher man than yourself. Engelhardt had done this, and more. At breakfast and at dinner
