Paul Brion's face wore a pleasant smile as he listened. "Oh, thank you," he replied lightly. "But I am very comfortable where I am--quite as much so as I was here--rather more, indeed. For the people at No. 6 have set up a piano on the other side of that wall"--pointing to the cedar chiffonnier--"and it bothered me dreadfully when I wanted to write. It was the piano drove me out--not you. Perhaps it will drive you out too. It is a horrible nuisance, for it is always out of tune; and you know the sort of playing that people indulge in who use pianos that are out of tune." So their little demonstration collapsed. Paul had gone away to please himself. "And has left _us_ to endure the agonies of a piano out of tune," commented Patty. As the day wore on, reaction from the mood of excitement and exaltation with which it began set in. Their spirits flagged. They felt tired and desolate in this new world. The unaccustomed hot dinner in the evening, at which they sat for nearly an hour in company with strange men who asked them questions, and pressed them to eat what they didn't want, was very uncongenial to them. And when, as soon as they could, they escaped to their own quarters, their little sitting-room, lighted with gas and full of hot upstairs air, struck them with its unsympathetic and unhomelike aspect. The next door piano was jingling its music-hall ditties faintly on the other side of the wall, and poor Dan, who had been banished to the back yard, was yelping so piteously that their hearts bled to hear him. "We must get a house of our own at once, Elizabeth--at _once_," exclaimed Eleanor--"if only for Dan's sake." "We will never have pets again--never!" said Patty, with something like an incipient sob in her voice, as she paced restlessly about the room. "Then we shall not have to ill-treat them and to part from them." She was thinking of her little bear, and the opossum, and the magpies, who were worse off than Dan. And Elizabeth sat down at the table, and took out pencil and note-book with a careworn face. She was going to keep accounts strictly, as Mr. Brion had advised her, and they not only meant to live within their income, as a matter of course, but to save a large part of it for future European contingencies. And, totting up the items of their expenditure for three days--cost of passage by steamer, cost of provisions on board, cab fare, and the sum paid for a week's board and lodging in advance--she found that they had been living for that period at the rate of about a thousand a year. So that, upon the whole, they were not quite so happy as they had expected to be, when they went to bed. CHAPTER VII. A MORNING WALK.