"Stevenson_Markheim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stevenson Robert Louis)

"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."