"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 on 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 afterwards, Miss Blake, whose nerves were no secret possession, hastened into the salon, and in her usual imperious fashion demanded 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 having bestowed upon her a condescending nod, passed out into the garden, where she told some of the visitors that the piano had been tuned at last, and that the tuner was a young woman of rather eccentric appearance. "Really it is quite abominable how women thrust themselves into every profession," she remarked in her masculine voice. "It is so unfeminine, so unseemly." There was nothing of the feminine about Miss Blake: her horse-cloth dress, her waistcoat and high collar, and her billy-cock hat were of the masculine genus; even her nerves could not be called feminine, since we learn from two or three doctors (taken off their guard) that nerves are neither feminine nor masculine, but common. "I should like to see this tuner," said one of the tennis players, leaning against a tree. "Here she comes," said Miss Blake, as the little girl was seen sauntering, into the garden. The men put up their eye-glasses, and saw a little lady with a childish face and soft brown hair, of strictly feminine appearance and bearing. The goat came toward her and began nibbling at her frock. She seemed to understand the manner of goats, and played with him to his heart’s content. One of the tennis players, Oswald Everard by name, strolled down to the bank where she was having her frolic. "Good afternoon," he said, raising his cap. "I hope the goat is not worrying you. Poor little fellow! This is his last day of play. He is to be killed to-morrow for table d’hôte." "What a shame!" she said. "Fancy to be killed, and then grumbled at!" "That is precisely what we do here," he said, laughing. "We grumble at everything we eat. And I own to being one of the grumpiest; though the lady in the horse-cloth dress yonder follows close upon my heels."