him, but she had commanded him to light his pipe, and as often as she dropped the book into her lap to make a remark, she could reckon upon a sympathetic answer, preceded by a puff of the tobacco-smoke she loved.

[Pg 26]

"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.[Pg 27] Miss Pryse was keeping tally aloud when the manager blundered upon the scene.

[Pg 27]

"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[Pg 28] who've been working like Kanakas all the week."

[Pg 28]

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