Part 4

"Here am I," she gasped, "who suffer and languish for a 'grand piano' as you call it. And you?" As though in real pain she began to wring her slim hands together. "And you? A lady gives you a grand piano and you curse her as a wretchedness!"

"Yes, I know," deprecated the Young Doctor. "But you see there isn't room in my office for both the piano and myself! My office is too small, you see. And with the piano filling up the whole center of the room? Why, it's absurd!" he quickened. "It's rotten! Patients who come don't know whether they've come for a music lesson or to be lanced! And besides," he added as his most culminative grievance, "I don't know one note from another! And the woman knew that I didn't! And worse than anything there are hordes of the most indecent little cupids appliqued or something all over the front of the thing!"

"Surely, something could be done," suggested the girl with a vague sort of farawayness in her blue eyes.

"Yes, that's just it!" remarked the Young Doctor, flushing. "I've already done it!"

Abjectly with his bared head bowed before her he stood as one awaiting just sentence.

"Of a personally," said the girl with her own cheeks spotting bright red. "Of a personally--I do not quite see the connection."

"Why the connection is perfectly clear!" insisted the Young Doctor. "She sent me the piano on purpose to crowd me out of my office! She wanted to crowd me out of my own office! She dared to affirm even that I needed to be crowded out of my own office! She tried to make me mad! She wanted to make me mad! She had the cheek to suggest, I mean, that nothing really interesting ever would happen to me until I once did get good and mad!" As though temporarily exhausted by his tirade he sagged back for a moment against the railing of the steps. His face did look a bit white and his teeth were almost chattering. "Well, I certainly did get good and mad this afternoon," he affirmed with a wry sort of apology. "And because I was so blooming mad I dashed out for a tremendous walk. And because I took such a tremendous walk I developed an appetite like forty tigers. And because I developed an appetite like forty tigers I rushed for the first restaurant I could find. And because I rushed for the first restaurant I could find I happened to see you at the exact moment when----"

"Oh, stop, stop, stop!" laughed the girl with her hands clapped suddenly over her ears. "It is all too much like the--like 'The House that the Jack-Man built!'"

"Well, at least," grinned the Young Doctor, "it seems to be 'The Adventure that the Grand Piano Threatened.'"

"The--the Adventure?" puzzled the girl.

"Why, yes," insisted the Young Doctor. "That's what this Mrs. Tome Gallien prophesied you know, that the piano would bring me an adventure! So you, very evidently, are the----"

"What? I?" stammered the girl. A flush of real pleasure glowed suddenly in her face and faded again as quickly as it had come. "Oh, no!" she said with some hauteur, "You--you----"

"Oh, truly!" begged the Young Doctor. "I'm most awfully sorry for what I did! I can't think what possessed me! I must have gone quite mad for the moment! Why, really," he flushed, "I don't know whether you'll believe me or not--and maybe it's something anyway to be more ashamed of than to brag about,--but truly now," he floundered, "I haven't kissed a girl before since--since I was very little!" With a sudden quick jerk of sheer awkwardness he snatched a card from his pocket and handed it to her. "There! There's my address!" he cried. "And to-morrow if you'll only send me the word I'll jump off the bridge or throw myself under a truck, or make any other sort of reparation whatever that happens to occur to you. But to-night," he grinned, "I've simply got to get warm!" And started down the steps.

But before he had quite reached the sidewalk the girl had overtaken him and placed a detaining hand on his coat sleeve.

"How old is she?" questioned the girl.

"Who?" said the Young Doctor. "Oh, the woman? She's old enough to be your mother."

"I'm twenty-one," conceded the girl.

"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 bad?" 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 strange 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.

"Once again, in the language of my opening sentence, and with all due respects, I repeat, 'I hope you're satisfied'!"

Then quite contented both in fancy and in fact he settled down to kill time and cure patients until Friday.

But the intervening days it seemed were not to be bereft entirely of sensations either confusing or bizarre.

On Wednesday night he heard from Mrs. Tome Gallien. And by telegram.

"Bungler!" wired Mrs. Tome Gallien. "What in creation have you done? The adventure intended for you does not arrive till Saturday, office, four o'clock."

The message happened to be delivered in writing this time, a flaunting yellow page, and, still clutching it tight by one twittering corner, the Young Doctor dropped down into the first chair he could reach, and with his chin dropped low like an old man's on his breast sat staring for an interminable time into his glowing fire.

Then quite suddenly at nine o'clock, with the funny new smile that he seemed to have acquired somewhere recently, he walked over to his telephone, fumbled a minute with the directory, experimented at least two minutes with Central's temper, located Miss Solvei Kjelland, and addressed her in his most formal manner.

"Miss Solvei Kjelland?" he questioned.

"S-o," said the familiar voice at the other end of the wire.

"This is Doctor Kendrue," he growled. "Dr. Sam Kendrue."

"So?" conceded the voice without a vestige of affright.

"It seems, Miss Kjelland," he stammered, "that there has been some sort of a--of a--well, misunderstanding about Friday afternoon. It is all a mistake, it seems, about your being The Adventure! Mrs. Gallien indeed has just telegraphed to that effect. The 'Real Adventure,' it appears, is not due at my office until four o'clock on Saturday!"

"S-o?" conceded Miss Solvei Kjelland. If she seemed to be swallowing rather extra hard once or twice the sound was not sharply discernible certainly from the little fluttering swallow of the telephone instrument. "So?" she repeated blithely. "Well, that is all right. The piano keeps! And the Saturday afternoon is just as good to me as the Friday! And I am all as curious with joy as you to see what it is, this Adventure that is more nice than me! Good night!"

"Good--night!" admitted the Young Doctor.

II

That the Young Doctor bought himself a new blue serge suit for Saturday was no indication whatsoever that he looked forward to that day with any pleasurable anticipation. Lots of people "doll-up" for disaster who couldn't even be hired to brush their hair for joy.

Quite frankly if anybody had asked him about it, the Young Doctor would have rated Mrs. Tome Gallien as a disaster.

If pressed further for justification of such a rating he would have argued that any rich woman who couldn't sleep was a disaster!

"Oh, it's all well enough for poor people," he would have admitted, "to put in the long night watches mulling over the weird things that they'd like to do. But when a person is actually able to leap up at the first gay crack of dawn and finance the weirdest fancy of his night!

"Oh, of course," he was honest enough to acknowledge. "Poor Mrs. Tome Gallien would never again while life lasted be able to 'leap up' at _any_ hour of the day or night! And she doubtless in her fifty eccentric years _had_ given extravagantly to no end of people who had proved themselves the stingiest sort of receivers! And her sense of humor even in her remotest, happiest youth must have been of course essentially caustic!

"But how any woman could reach a point so sick, so vindictive, so caustic, so rich, that still unable to strip herself of her lifelong passion for giving she should evolve the perfectly diabolic idea of giving people only the things that they didn't want--only the things, indeed, that she was absolutely positive they didn't want? Such as pianos! Grand pianos! Huge rosewood chunks of intricate mechanism and ornate decoration and Heaven knows what expense--crammed down into the meager crowded office of some poor struggling young doctor who didn't know a note from a gnat! Himself of course being the young doctor!

"Thought it was funny, did she? Thought it would really drive him outdoors for sheer rage into some sort of an enlivening adventure? That was her theory, was it? Well it _was_ funny. And it _had_ driven him out to meet a rather particularly enlivening sort of adventure! Which adventure in the person of a Miss Solvei Kjelland was now due at his office by her own insistent appointment, on Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. But this Miss Solvei Kjelland, it seems, was not the Adventure which Mrs. Tome Gallien had already arranged for him for Saturday afternoon, same hour, same place?"

Into his muddled mind flashed transiently a half-forgotten line of a novel to the effect: "Heaven help the day when the mate you made for yourself and the mate God made for you happen to meet!"

"Well, if it really came to a show-down between his Adventure and Mrs. Tome Gallien's?"

Quite unexpectedly his mouth began suddenly to twitch at one corner. Speaking of "caustic humor" it was barely possible that the Young Doctor had just a tiny bit of caustic humor himself. When a man smiles suddenly on one side of his mouth it is proof at least that he sees the joke. Nobody ought to be expected to smile on both sides till he feels the joke as well as sees it.

Certainly the poor Young Doctor was not feeling very much of anything at just this time except a sense of impending doom.

But in this sense of impending doom flickered the one ray of light that at least he knew what his own Adventure was: she was young, lithe, blonde, why as tall as himself, almost! A trifle unconventional, perhaps? Yes, even a good bit amazing! But thoroughly wholesome! And human? Yes that was just it, so deliciously and indisputably human!

But Mrs. Tome Gallien's Adventure? A woman like Mrs. Tome Gallien wouldn't stop at anything! It might be a pair of llamas from Peru! Or a greasy witchy-gypsy to tell his fortune! Or a homeless little jet-black pickaninny with a banjo and--consumption! Or--or an invitation even to lecture on physiology at a girls school! But whatever it proved to be he might just as well realize now that it would be something that he hated. Mrs. Tome Gallien in her present mood would certainly never seek to lull him with a "glad" as long as she saw any possible chance to rouse him with a "mad"!

"Well, he wouldn't get mad yet, anyway!" he promised himself with unwonted whimsicality. "And if it _was_ llamas--which perhaps on the whole would be his preference out of the various possibilities anticipated--they would at least, judging from the woolly pictures in the geographies, be free from any possible danger of barking their shins against the sharper edges of the piano. Whereas a committee of any size come to request a series of lectures on----"

Thus with one form or another of light mental exercise did he try to keep his brain clear and his pulse normal for the approaching Saturday.

But Saturday itself dawned neither clear nor normal. Rain, snow, slush, wind, had changed the whole outdoor world into a blizzard.

It was one of those days when anything might blow in. But how in the world would it ever blow out again? With this threat of eternity added to uncertainty the Young Doctor decided quite impulsively to dust his desk, and investigate his ice-chest. To his infinite relief he found at least very little food in the ice-chest. Whatever happened it could not possibly prove a very long siege! A half pound of butter, a box of rusks, a can of coffee, six or seven eggs, divided up among any kind of a committee, or even between two llamas? At the increasing excitability of his fancies he determined very suddenly to sober himself with hard reading.

With this intent, as soon as he had finished his breakfast he took down from his bookcase a very erudite treatise on "The Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint" and proceeded to devote himself to it. "Now here was something serious. Thoroughly serious. Science! Heaven be praised for Science!"

By noon, indeed, he was so absorbed in "The Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint" that he quite forgot about luncheon. And at three o'clock he looked down with a glance of surprise to see that the toes of his boots were dipping into a tiny rivulet which seemed flowing to him from the farther side of the room. By craning his neck around the corner of the piano he noted with increasing astonishment that the rivulet sprang essentially from the black ferule of an umbrella, and that just beyond the dripping black ferule of that umbrella was the dripping black ferule of another umbrella, and beyond that, still an other!

Jumping joyously to his feet he made three apologies in one to the group that loomed up before him.

"Why, I beg your pardon," he began to the wheezy old man who sat nearest him. "Really I--I--had no idea," he explained painstakingly to the small freckled boy just beyond. "With all this wind and everything--and the way the rain rattles against the window," he stammered to the crape-swathed woman in the far corner. None of these was presumably Mrs. Tome Gallien's Adventure, but it was surely adventure enough of itself on the old oak settle, where almost no one ever sat even on pleasant days, to behold three patients sitting crowded--and in a blizzard! "I was so absorbed in my book!" he boasted with sudden nonchalance.

"Oh, that's all right, sir," wheezed the Old Man. "I was just waitin' for a car. And it looked drier in here than where I was standin' outdoors."

And "Say, Mister, do you pull teeth?" questioned the small freckled boy.

But the Crape-Swathed Lady was a real patient. Though goodness knows the Young Doctor would gladly have drawn either the old man or the small boy in her place. All his life long he had particularly disapproved of "mourning." It was false, spiritually, he thought. It was bad, psychologically. Everybody knew of course that it was unwise hygienically. But worst of anything perhaps the woman before him now made him think of a damp black cat.

It was perfectly evident, however, that the lady herself cherished no such unpleasant self-consciousness.

With perfect complacency at his request she came forward to the light, or at least to such light as the storm-lashed window allowed and, still swathed as blackly from view as any harem lady, stated her case.

"I have such a pain--here," she pointed with black-gloved hand toward her black-veiled face.

Did she also take him for a tooth puller? mused the Young Doctor. With all haste he sought to settle the matter at once. "If you will kindly remove your--er--bonnet--is it that you call it?" he asked.

Compliantly the unpleasant black-gloved hands busied themselves for a moment with pin or knot until emerging slowly from its dank black draperies there lifted at last to the Young Doctor's gasping stare the most exquisitely-featured, dreamy-eyed young brunette face that he had ever seen outside a Salon catalogue.

"Here! Just here is the pain!" pointed the black-gloved finger to a spot right in front of the most absurd little ear.

"Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint!" gasped the Young Doctor just like a swear. Even as scientifically as he touched the pain-spot he felt his own wrist wobble most unscientifically with the contact. It was no wonder perhaps that the dark eyes before him dilated with a vague sort of alarm.

"Is it--is it as bad as that?" faltered his patient.

"Why, it isn't that at all!" hastened the Young Doctor with a sudden resumption of sagacity. "It's probably just a sort of rheumatism. What made me cry out so was just a mere funny coincidence. This particular kind of pain being a subject that I--that I--if I may say so--have been giving rather special attention to lately."

"Oh, then I trust that I have come to just the right person," smiled the dark eyes with a kindling surface-sweetness that seemed nevertheless quite frankly bereft of any special inner enthusiasm.

"We will certainly hope so!" flushed the Young Doctor. "How about this pain--?" he began quite abruptly.

"It hurts me when I eat," said the girl. Her voice was very low and soft and drawling. "And when I drink. And when I talk," she confided. "But especially when I sing."

"Oh, you sing?" questioned the Young Doctor.

"Yes!" said the girl. For the first time her classic, immobile little face was quick with a very modern emotion.

"Personally," confessed the Young Doctor, "I should like very much to try a little experiment on you if you don't mind. It will help me, even if it hurts you."

"As you wish," acquiesced the girl with the same imperturbable little smile.

From his precipitous retreat into the other room he returned after due delay with a plate of rusks and a steaming hot cup of coffee.

"It's such a horrid day," he said. "And you look so wet and cold, perhaps a taste of coffee wouldn't come in altogether amiss. But it's these rusks that I'm really interested in. I want you to bite down hard on them. And then presently perhaps I will ask you to sing so that I may watch the--Oh, by the way," he interrupted himself irrelevantly. "I neglected, I think, to ask your name."

"My name," said the girl, "is Kendrue."

"What?" questioned the Young Doctor. "Why that is my name," he smiled.

"Yes, I know," murmured the girl. "Coincidences of that sort are certainly very strange. It was one of the first things my aunt spoke of when I asked her advice about what physician to go to. I am a comparative stranger in the city," she added a bit shiveringly. "But didn't my aunt tell you I was coming?" she quickened suddenly. "Didn't my aunt, Mrs. Tome Gallien, write you--or something--that I was coming?"

"Mrs. Tome Gallien?" jumped the Young Doctor. Chaotically through his senses quickened a dozen new angers, a dozen new resentments. A girl? So this was Mrs. Tome Gallien's threatened "Adventure," was it? Of all the spiteful possibilities in the world, now wasn't this just like the amiable lady in question to foist another girl into a situation quite sufficiently embarrassed with "girl" as it was! "Is--is Mrs. Tome Gallien your--aunt?" he demanded with such sudden stentorious sternness that even the most bona fide blood-relation would hardly have acquiesced without pausing an instant to reconsider the matter.

"Well, not of course, not exactly a real aunt," admitted the girl. "But I have always called her my aunt. We have always been very intimate. Or rather perhaps I should say she had always been very, very kind to me. And now, since my father--" With the unmistakable air of one who strives suddenly to suppress an almost overwhelming emotion she pointed irrelevantly to the piano and waved off the plate of rusks and the cup of coffee which the Young Doctor still stood proffering. "You must excuse me if I--if I--seem distrait," she stammered. "But in addition to the very real annoyance that this little pain in my jaw is giving me I am--I am so bewildered about that piano! Where did you get it?" she asked quite bluntly.

"Why it came from Such-and-Such warerooms I believe," admitted the Young Doctor with as much frankness as he could summon at the moment.

With a little soft sigh the girl reached out and touched the dark, gleaming woodwork.

"I thought so," she whispered. "And--oh, how you must love it! It is certainly the most beautiful instrument that I ever saw in my life! The most melodious, I mean! The most nearly perfect sounding-board! An utter miracle of tone and flexibility as an accompanist to the human voice!"

"U--m--mmmm," said the Young Doctor.

"For two months," persisted the girl, "I have been haunting the warerooms you speak of! For two months I have been moving heaven and earth in an effort to possess it! But my means being temporarily tied up," she shivered again ever so slightly, "I was not able immediately to--" With that odd, inert little smile she reached out for the plate of rusks and took one as the Young Doctor had requested. "Yes, here is the pain," she explained conscientiously. "But only last week," she winced, "on my birthday it was! I had every reason in the world to believe that Mrs. Tome Gallien was going to give the piano to me! She has given me so many wonderful things! But she sent me instead the deed to a duck blind down somewhere on the South Carolina coast,--shooting, you know? And dreadful guns! And dogs! And all that! I, who wouldn't even hurt a sparrow, or scare a kitten!"

With his hands clapped to his head the Young Doctor swung around suddenly and started for the window.