The Street of Seven Stars

This etext was prepared by Michael Delaney of Laurel, MD.

THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

CHAPTER I

The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have been a garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a royal game preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria Theresa had used the building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly there was something royal in the proportions of the salon. With all the candles lighted in the great glass chandelier, and no sidelights, so that the broken paneling was mercifully obscured by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great empress herself had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to anecdotes of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed, related not a few herself.

The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night. Outside in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named Scatchett and dubbed “Scatch”—the gate slammed to and fro monotonously, giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched itself, a hope that was always destroyed by the next gust.

One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the purpose of enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto, it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a crumpled napkin or two,—there were never enough to go round,—and on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly abandoned for the things of the flesh.

The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with the slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled near the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no impatience, however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put them together carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of the grand piano, anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from the stand.

The room was very bare—a long mirror between two of the windows, half a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano. There were no rugs—the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners and was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice under her fingers.

In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.

The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let the initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had been made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what; and it revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of trunks. The girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and looked at the trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A door slammed down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into one of those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.

The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells, a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite “Arlesienne” will serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from “Siegfried” will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more than once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of early rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with stiffened fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a stove, and sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once pink butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls, and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves and holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down the stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German, helped to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one might practice peacefully.

Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning he shook his fist up the stone staircase.

“Gott im Himmel!” he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of his mustache bandage, “what a people, these Americans! So much noise and no music!”

“And mad!” grumbled his wife. “All the day coal, coal to heat; and at night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it.”

And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going back to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her head much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar sisters had gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed, funds were very low with all of them. The “Bitte zum speisen” of the little German maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a stew of beef and carrots.

Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days—a fruitcake from Harmony’s mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or twice on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and worth it. Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and cheapness, and a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh, yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and the faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all had always, the old tragedy of the American music student abroad—the expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master himself, the contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And always back in one’s mind the home people, to whom one dares not confess that after nine months of waiting, or a year, one has seen the Master once or not at all.

Or—and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this sear in her soul—to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often. Harmony stood on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big Soprano was calling down the hall.

“Scatch,” she was shouting briskly, “where is my hairbrush?”

A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.

“I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven’t you got a comb?”

“As soon as I get something on I’m coming to shake you. Half the teeth are out of my comb. I don’t believe you packed it. Look under the bed.”

Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.

“Here it is,” she called joyously. “And here are Harmony’s bedroom slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!” The girl got down off the chair and went to the door.

“Thanks, dear,” she said. “I’m coming in a minute.”

She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa, and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the window the air would brighten them.

Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano’s room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her shabby wrapper about her and listened just inside the door. There were no footsteps, only the banging of the gate in the wind. She turned to the Big Soprano, heating a curling iron in the flame of a candle, and held out her hand.

“Look!” she said. “Under my bed! Ten kronen!”

Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and ponderously getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected the dusty floor beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it.

“The first for a week,” she said. “Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there may be another relic of my prosperous days.”

But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the ten-kronen piece.

“Where is the other?” she asked in a whisper.

“In my powder-box.”

Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece.

“Every little bit,” she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, “added to what she’s got, makes just a little bit more.”

“Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it, it’s good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without losing it now. I’ll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New York—I haven’t even a dollar for tips.”

“New York!” said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. “If Henry meets me I know he will—”

“Tut!” The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. “You and your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your maudlin young mind that money isn’t the only thing Harmony is going to need? She’s going to be alone—and this is a bad town to be alone in. And she is not like us. You have your Henry. I’m a beefy person who has a stomach, and I’m thankful for it. But she is different—she’s got the thing that you are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to fight in a church choir instead of grand opera.”

Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.

“Temperament?” she asked. It had always been accepted in the little colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser firmament.

The Big Soprano sniffed.

“If you like,” she said. “Soul is a better word. Only the rich ought to have souls, Scatchy, dear.”

This was over the younger girl’s head, and anyhow Harmony was coming down the hall.

“I thought, under her pillow,” she whispered. “She’ll find it—”

Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the flame of a candle.

CHAPTER II

Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry’s arms about her, had forgotten it. The candles in the great chandelier had died in tears of paraffin that spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets were still smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the room.

Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an uneasy sense of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning trees and slamming gate and the great dark house in the background, was a forbidding place at best. She had rung the bell and had stood, her back against the door, eyes and ears strained in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure had stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment the gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind her.

The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented when he smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in spite of the early morning practicing; she looked like a singer at the opera for whom he cherished a hidden attachment. The singer had never seen him, but it was for her he wore the mustache bandage. Perhaps some day—hopefully! One must be ready!

The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his tip, the five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and Rosa was a niece of his wife and talked more than she should. He refused the tip with a gesture.

“Bitte, Fraulein!” he said through the bandage. “It is for me a pleasure to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a basin of soup.”

The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open over his hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor. But to Harmony that lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to speak and could not but she held out her hand in impulsive gratitude, and the Portier in his best manner bent over and kissed it. As she reached the curve of the stone staircase, carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her with his eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.

The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were comforting to Harmony’s ears. From the safety of the darkened salon she peered out into the garden again, but no skulking figure detached itself from the shadows, and the gate remained, for a marvel, closed.

It was when—having picked up her violin in a very passion of loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar sounds echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms—it was when she was ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the gifted:—

DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you’d not deny us this pleasure. Harry, you have it—the real thing, you know, whatever it is—and I haven’t. None of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To go now, just when lessons would mean everything—well, you must not think of it. We have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us, or at least—well, I’m lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by being careful, and we want you to have this. It isn’t much, but it may help. Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and it may be yours anyhow.

“Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things about our leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You are so beautiful, Harry,—although you never let us tell you so. And Sadie says you have a soul and I haven’t, and that souls are deadly things to have. I feel to-night that in urging you to stay I am taking the burden of your soul on me! Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you call a policeman. And be sure you get into a respectable pension. There are queer ones.

“Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from home—you said your mother would get insurance, didn’t you?—and will keep this as a sort of fund to take you home if anything should go wrong—. But perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any case, of course it’s a loan, and you can preserve that magnificent independence of yours by sending it back when you get to work to make your fortune. And if you are doubtful at all, just remember that hopeful little mother of yours who sent you over to get what she had never been able to have for herself, and who planned this for you from the time you were a kiddy and she named you Harmony.

“I’m not saying good-bye. I can’t.

SCATCH.”

That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their crimson feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the salon shook in the draft as if the old Austrian court still danced beneath, Harmony fought her battle. And a battle it was. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had not known everything. There had been no insurance on her father’s life; the little mother was penniless. A married sister would care for her, but what then? Harmony had enough remaining of her letter-of credit to take her home, and she had—the hoard under the pillow. To go back and teach the violin; or to stay and finish under the master, be presented, as he had promised her, at a special concert in Vienna, with all the prestige at home that that would mean, and its resulting possibility of fame and fortune—which?

She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she could teach English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some of the stores advertised “English Spoken.” That would be something to fall back on, a clerkship during the day.

Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went into the Big Soprano’s deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with loneliness.

She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet under her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier, crawling out into the cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall and listened. She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in his night attire, his chest open to the frigid morning air, his face upraised to the floor above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.

When the music had died away he went in and closed the door sheepishly. His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her hand. She eyed him.

“So! It is the American Fraulein now!”

“I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music.” He fumbled with hismustache bandage, which was knotted behind, keeping one eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it for him.

“She leaves to-day,” she announced, ignoring the knot.

“Why? She is alone. Rosa says—”

“She leaves to-day!”

The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth compactness. The Portier jerked at it.

“No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what saw I last night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up the stair after her! A man in the gateway!”

The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage, which had slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great knife.

“She will stay if she so desire,” he muttered furiously, and, raising the knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache, faintly gray and sweetly up-curled, stood revealed.

“She will stay!” he repeated. “And when you see men at the gate, let me know. She is an angel!”

“And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?”

This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come from telling one’s cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in one’s heart. Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and to-day—Himmel, the girl must go!

Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and expensive; Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere a tiny room with board, a humble little room but with a stove. It is folly to practice with stiffened fingers. A room where her playing would not annoy people, that was important.

She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that purpose. Rosa wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for her keep, because it was not the custom for young ladies to be alone in the city—young girls of the people, of course; but beautiful young ladies, no!

Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude, but she could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk, she went down to interview the Portier and his wife, who were agents under the owner for the old house.

The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He looked past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that the lease was up and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight she was not so like the angel, and after all she could only play the violin. The angel had a voice, such a voice! And besides, there was an eye at the crack of the door.

The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a heavy heart that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper quarters.

Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the gutters were frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in the mountains the day before and hanging from a hook before a wildgame shop, was frozen quite stiff. It was a pretty creature. The girl turned her eyes away. A young man, buying cheese and tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.

“That’s an American girl, isn’t it?” he asked in American-German.

The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him, and Rosa talked. When the American left the shop he knew everything of Harmony that Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called her “The Beautiful One.” Also he was short one krone four beliers in his change, which is readily done when a customer is plainly thinking of a “beautiful one.”

Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a stove and no objection to practicing. There were plenty—but the rates! The willow plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of making the plainest garments appear costly. Landladies looked at the plume and the suit and heard the soft swish of silk beneath, which marks only self-respect in the American woman but is extravagance in Europe, and added to their regular terms until poor Harmony’s heart almost stood still. And then at last toward evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the corner of the Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing, and the landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears for earache, Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.

A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in the center, and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye appear higher than the other and twisted one’s nose. But there was an odor of stewing cabbage in the air. Also, alas, there was the odor of many previous stewed cabbages, and of dusty carpets and stale tobacco. Harmony had had no lunch; she turned rather faint.

She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative purity of the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She reeled once or twice. At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood for a moment with her eyes closed, to the dismay of a young man who had just come in with a cheese and some tinned fish under his arm.

He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.

“Not ill, are you?” he asked in English, and then remembering. “Bist du krank?” He colored violently at that, recalling too late the familiarity of the “du.”

Harmony smiled faintly.

“Only tired,” she said in English. “And the odor of cabbage—”.

Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting hand. He whistled softly. He had recognized her.

“Cabbage, of course!” he said. “The pension upstairs is full of it. I live there, and I’ve eaten so much of it I could be served up with pork.”

“I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?”

He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.

“So bad,” he observed, “that I keep body and soul together by buying strong and odorous food at the delicatessens—odorous, because only rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there. Cheese is the only thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and once or twice even cheese has retired defeated.”

“But I don’t like cheese.” In sheer relief from the loneliness of the day her spirits were rising.

“Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the corner. I say—” He hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Would you—don’t you think a cup of coffee would set you up a bit?”

“It sounds attractive,”—uncertainly.

“Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?”

Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see this brisk young American—young, she knew by his voice, tall by his silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could not see his face, but she liked his voice.

“Do you mean—with you?”

“I’m a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription.”

That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were legitimate friends in need.

“I am sure it is not proper, but—”

“Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for professional services. Besides, won’t we be formally introduced to-night by the landlady? Come now—to the coffee-house and the Paris edition of the ‘Herald’!” But the next moment he paused and ran his hand over his chin. “I’m pretty disreputable,” he explained. “I have been in a clinic all day, and, hang it all, I’m not shaved.”

“What difference does that make?”

“My dear young lady,” he explained gravely, picking up the cheese and the tinned fish, “it makes a difference in me that I wish you to realize before you see me in a strong light.”

He rapped at the Portier’s door, with the intention of leaving his parcels there, but receiving no reply tucked them under his arm. A moment later Harmony was in the open air, rather dazed, a bit excited, and lovely with the color the adventure brought into her face. Her companion walked beside her, tall, slightly stooped. She essayed a fugitive little sideglance up at him, and meeting his eyes hastily averted hers.

They passed a policeman, and suddenly there flashed into the girl’s mind little Scatchett’s letter.

“Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you, call a policeman.”

CHAPTER III

The coffee-house was warm and bright. Round its small tables were gathered miscellaneous groups, here and there a woman, but mostly men—uniformed officers, who made of the neighborhood coffee-house a sort of club, where under their breath they criticized the Government and retailed small regimental gossip; professors from the university, still wearing under the beards of middle life the fine horizontal scars of student days; elderly doctors from the general hospital across the street; even a Hofrath or two, drinking beer and reading the “Fliegende Blaetter” and “Simplicissimus”; and in an alcove round a billiard table a group of noisy Korps students. Over all a permeating odor of coffee, strong black coffee, made with a fig or two to give it color. It rose even above the blue tobacco haze and dominated the atmosphere with its spicy and stimulating richness. A bustle of waiters, a hum of conversation, the rattle of newspapers and the click of billiard balls—this was the coffee-house.

Harmony had never been inside one before. The little music colony had been a tight-closed corporation, retaining its American integrity, in spite of the salon of Maria Theresa and three expensive lessons a week in German. Harmony knew the art galleries and the churches, which were free, and the opera, thanks to no butter at supper. But of that backbone of Austrian life, the coffee-house, she was profoundly ignorant.

Her companion found her a seat in a corner near a heater and disappeared for an instant on the search for the Paris edition of the “Herald.” The girl followed him with her eyes. Seen under the bright electric lights, he was not handsome, hardly goodlooking. His mouth was wide, his nose irregular, his hair a nondescript brown,—but the mouth had humor, the nose character, and, thank Heaven, there was plenty of hair. Not that Harmony saw all this at once. As he tacked to and fro round the tables, with a nod here and a word there, she got a sort of ensemble effect—a tall man, possibly thirty, broadshouldered, somewhat stooped, as tall men are apt to be. And shabby, undeniably shabby!

The shabbiness was a shock. A much-braided officer, trim from the points of his mustache to the points of his shoes, rose to speak to him. The shabbiness was accentuated by the contrast. Possibly the revelation was an easement to the girl’s nervousness. This smiling and unpressed individual, blithely waving aloft the Paris edition of the “Herald” and equally blithely ignoring the maledictions of the student from whom he had taken it—even Scatchy could not have called him a vulture or threatened him with the police.

He placed the paper before her and sat down at her side, not to interfere with her outlook over the room.

“Warmer?” he asked.

“Very much.”

“Coffee is coming. And cinnamon cakes with plenty of sugar. They know me here and they know where I live. They save the sugariest cakes for me. Don’t let me bother you; go on and read. See which of the smart set is getting a divorce—or is it always the same one? And who’s President back home.”

“I’d rather look round. It’s curious, isn’t it?”

“Curious? It’s heavenly! It’s the one thing I am going to take back to America with me—one coffee-house, one dozen military men for local color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor’s wife to sit in the cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I’ll grow wealthy.”

“But what about the medical practice?”

He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the humorous promise of his mouth.

“Why, it will work out perfectly,” he said whimsically. “The great American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee until the feeble American nervous system will be shattered. I shall have an office across the street!”

After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade conversation until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes, too, and he watched her with comfortable satisfaction.

“Nod your head but don’t speak,” he said. “Remember, I am prescribing, and there’s to be no conversation until the coffee is down. Shall I or shall I not open the cheese?”

But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an occasional swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits of news from the paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast an eye over the crowded room. Here and there an officer, gazing with too open admiration on Harmony’s lovely face, found himself fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes that were anything but humorous at that instant, and thought best to shift his gaze.

The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But the unknown protested.

“The function of a coffee-house,” he explained gravely, “is twofold. Coffee is only the first half. The second half is conversation.”

“I converse very badly.”

“So do I. Suppose we talk about ourselves. We are sure to do that well. Shall I commence?”

Harmony was in no mood to protest. Having swallowed coffee, why choke over conversation? Besides, she was very comfortable. It was warm there, with the heater at her back; better than the little room with the sagging bed and the doors covered with wall paper. Her feet had stopped aching, too, She could have sat there for hours. And—why evade it?—she was interested. This whimsical and respectful young man with his absurd talk and his shabby clothes had roused her curiosity.

“Please,” she assented.

“Then, first of all, my name. I’m getting that over early, because it isn’t much, as names go. Peter Byrne it is. Don’t shudder.”

“Certainly I’m not shuddering.”

“I have another name, put in by my Irish father to conciliate a German uncle of my mother’s. Augustus! It’s rather a mess. What shall I put on my professional brassplate? If I put P. Augustus Byrne nobody’s fooled. They know my wretched first name is Peter.”

“Or Patrick.”

“I rather like Patrick—if I thought it might pass as Patrick! Patrick has possibilities. The diminutive is Pat, and that’s not bad. But Peter!”

“Do you know,” Harmony confessed half shyly, “I like Peter as a name.”

“Peter it shall be, then. I go down to posterity and fame as Peter Byrne. The rest doesn’t amount to much, but I want you to know it, since you have been good enough to accept me on faith. I’m here alone, from a little town in eastern Ohio; worked my way through a coeducational college in the West and escaped unmarried; did two years in a drygoods store until, by saving and working in my vacations, I got through medical college and tried general practice. Didn’t like it—always wanted to do surgery. A little legacy from the German uncle, trying to atone for the ‘Augustus,’ gave me enough money to come here. I’ve got a chance with the Days—surgeons, you know—when I go back, if I can hang on long enough. That’s all. Here’s a traveler’s check with my name on it, to vouch for the truth of this thrilling narrative. Gaze on it with awe; there are only a few of them left!”

Harmony was as delicately strung, as vibratingly responsive as the strings of her own violin, and under the even lightness of his tone she felt many things that met a response in her—loneliness and struggle, and the ever-present anxiety about money, grim determination, hope and fear, and even occasional despair. He was still young, but there were lines in his face and a hint of gray in his hair. Even had he been less frank, she would have known soon enough—the dingy little pension, the shabby clothes—

She held out her hand.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said simply. “I think I understand very well because—it’s music with me: violin. And my friends have gone, so I am alone, too.”

He leaned his elbows on the table and looked out over the crowd without seeing it.

“It’s curious, isn’t it?” he said. “Here we are, you and I, meeting in the center of Europe, both lonely as the mischief, both working our heads off for an idea that may never pan out! Why aren’t you at home to-night, eating a civilized beefsteak and running upstairs to get ready for a nice young man to bring you a box of chocolates? Why am I not measuring out calico in Shipley & West’s? Instead, we are going to Frau Schwarz’, to listen to cold ham and scorched compote eaten in six different languages.”

Harmony made no immediate reply. He seemed to expect none. She was drawing on her gloves, her eyes, like his, roving over the crowd.

Far back among the tables a young man rose and yawned. Then, seeing Byrne, he waved a greeting to him. Byrne’s eyes, from being introspective, became watchful.

The young man was handsome in a florid, red-checked way, with black hair and blue eyes. Unlike Byrne, he was foppishly neat. He was not alone. A slim little Austrian girl, exceedingly chic, rose when he did and threw away the end of a cigarette.

“Why do we go so soon?” she demanded fretfully in German. “It is early still.”

He replied in English. It was a curious way they had, and eminently satisfactory, each understanding better than he spoke the other’s language.

“Because, my beloved,” he said lightly, “you are smoking a great many poisonous and highly expensive cigarettes. Also I wish to speak to Peter.”

The girl followed his eyes and stiffened jealously.

“Who is that with Peter?”

“We are going over to find out, little one. Old Peter with a woman at last!”

The little Austrian walked delicately, swaying her slim body with a slow and sensuous grace. She touched an officer as she passed him, and paused to apologize, to the officer’s delight and her escort’s irritation. And Peter Byrne watched and waited, a line of annoyance between his brows. The girl was ahead; that complicated things.

When she was within a dozen feet of the table he rose hastily, with a word of apology, and met the couple. It was adroitly done. He had taken the little Austrian’s arm and led her by the table while he was still greeting her. He held her in conversation in his absurd German until they had reached the swinging doors, while her companion followed helplessly. And he bowed her out, protesting his undying admiration for her eyes, while the florid youth alternately raged behind him and stared back at Harmony, interested and unconscious behind her table.

The little Austrian was on the pavement when Byrne turned, unsmiling, to the other man.

“That won’t do, you know, Stewart,” he said, grave but not unfriendly.

“The Kid wouldn’t bite her.”

“We’ll not argue about it.”

After a second’s awkward pause Stewart smiled.

“Certainly not,” he agreed cheerfully. “That is up to you, of course. I didn’t know. We’re looking for you to-night.”

A sudden repulsion for the evening’s engagement rose in Byrne, but the situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.

“I’ll be round,” he said. “I have a lecture and I may be late, but I’ll come.”

The “Kid” was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in air, angrily flushed.

“You saw!” she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped a hand through her arm. “He protects her from me! It is because of you. Before I knew you—”

“Before you knew me, little one,” he said cheerfully, “you were exactly what you are now.”

She paused on the curb and raised her voice.

“So! And what is that?”

“Beautiful as the stars, only—not so remote.”

In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The “beautiful” calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused her suspicion.

“Remote? What is that?”

“I was thinking of Worthington.”

The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.

In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of soldiers trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the pavement and dodged verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and German epithets. He drew his chin into the upturned collar of his overcoat and waited, an absurdly patient figure, until the hail of consonants had subsided into a rain of tears. Then he took the girl’s elbow again and led her, childishly weeping, into a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and eyes of the Alserstrasse.

Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl was closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not his, or of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely, alluring, rather puzzled at this moment, was also a situation. For there was a situation. He had suspected it that morning, listening to the delicatessen-seller’s narrative of Rosa’s account of the disrupted colony across in the old lodge; he had been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the dark entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright light of the coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her beauty, the emotional coming and going of her color, her frank loneliness, and God save the mark!—her trust in him, he accepted the situation and adopted it: his responsibility, if you please.

He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly well—enough to love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had seen its tragedies and passed them by, or had, in his haphazard way, thrown a greeting to them, or even a glass of native wine. And he knew the musical temperament; the all or nothing of its insistent demands; its heights that are higher than others, its wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt Theater, where he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had known in Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking her own meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater she had worn a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.

Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its years of coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter’s new resolution that night: this poverty adopting poverty, this youth adopting youth, with the altruistic purpose of saving it from itself.

And this, mind you, before Peter Byrne had heard Harmony’s story or knew her name, Rosa having called her “The Beautiful One” in her narrative, and the delicatessen-seller being literal in his repetition.

Back to “The Beautiful One” went Peter Byrne, and, true to his new part of protector and guardian, squared his shoulders and tried to look much older than he really was, and responsible. The result was a grimness that alarmed Harmony back to the forgotten proprieties.

“I think I must go,” she said hurriedly, after a glance at his determinedly altruistic profile. “I must finish packing my things. The Portier has promised—”

“Go! Why, you haven’t even told me your name!”

“Frau Schwarz will present you to-night,” primly and rising.

Peter Byrne rose, too.

“I am going back with you. You should not go through that lonely yard alone after dark.”

“Yard! How do you know that?”

Byrne was picking up the cheese, which he had thoughtlessly set on the heater, and which proved to be in an alarming state of dissolution. It took a moment to rewrap, and incidentally furnished an inspiration. He indicated it airily.

“Saw you this morning coming out—delicatessen shop across the street,” he said glibly. And then, in an outburst of honesty which the girl’s eyes seemed somehow to compel: “That’s true, but it’s not all the truth. I was on the bus last night, and when you got off alone I—I saw you were an American, and that’s not a good neighborhood. I took the liberty of following you to your gate!”

He need not have been alarmed. Harmony was only grateful, and said so. And in her gratitude she made no objection to his suggestion that he see her safely to the old lodge and help her carry her hand-luggage and her violin to the pension. He paid the trifling score, and followed by many eyes in the room they went out into the crisp night together.

At the lodge the doors stood wide, and a vigorous sound of scrubbing showed that the Portier’s wife was preparing for the inspection of possible new tenants. She was cleaning down the stairs by the light of a candle, and the steam of the hot water on the cold marble invested her like an aura. She stood aside to let them pass, and then went cumbrously down the stairs to where, a fork in one hand and a pipe in the other, the Portier was frying chops for the evening meal.

“What have I said?” she demanded from the doorway. “Your angel is here.”

“So!”

“She with whom you sing, old cracked voice! Whose money you refuse, because she reminds you of your opera singer! She is again here, and with a man!”

“It is the way of the young and beautiful—there is always a man,” said the Portier, turning a chop.

His wife wiped her steaming hands on her apron and turned away, exasperated.

“It is the same man whom I last night saw at the gate,” she threw back over her shoulder. “I knew it from the first; but you, great booby, can see nothing but red lips. Bah!”

Upstairs in the salon of Maria Theresa, lighted by one candle and freezing cold, in a stiff chair under the great chandelier Peter Byrne sat and waited and blew on his fingers. Down below, in the Street of Seven Stars, the arc lights swung in the wind.

CHAPTER IV

The supper that evening was even unusually bad. Frau Schwarz, much crimped and clad in frayed black satin, presided at the head of the long table. There were few, almost no Americans, the Americans flocking to good food at reckless prices in more fashionable pensions; to the Frau Gallitzenstein’s, for instance, in the Kochgasse, where there was to be had real beefsteak, where turkeys were served at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and where, were one so minded, one might revel in whipped cream.

The Pension Schwarz, however, was not without adornment. In the center of the table was a large bunch of red cotton roses with wire stems and green paper leaves, and over the side-table, with its luxury of compote in tall glass dishes and its wealth of small hard cakes, there hung a framed motto which said, “Nicht Rauchen,” “No Smoking,”—and which looked suspiciously as if it had once adorned a compartment of a railroad train.

Peter Byrne was early in the dining-room. He had made, for him, a careful toilet, which consisted of a shave and clean linen. But he had gone further: He had discovered, for the first time in the three months of its defection, a button missing from his coat, and had set about to replace it. He had cut a button from another coat, by the easy method of amputating it with a surgical bistoury, and had sewed it in its new position with a curved surgical needle and a few inches of sterilized catgut. The operation was slow and painful, and accomplished only with the aid of two cigarettes and an artery clip. When it was over he tied the ends in a surgeon’s knot underneath and stood back to consider the result. It seemed neat enough, but conspicuous. After a moment or two of troubled thought he blacked the white catgut with a dot of ink and went on his way rejoicing.

Peter Byrne was entirely untroubled as to the wisdom of the course he had laid out for himself. He followed no consecutive line of thought as he dressed. When he was not smoking he was whistling, and when he was doing neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers, he was swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The materials for a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an obelisk in a cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive, and hardly necessary when one sleeps with all one’s windows open—one window, to be exact, the room being very small—and spends most of the day in a warm and comfortable shambles called a hospital.

To tell the truth he was not thinking of Harmony at all, except subconsciously, as instance the button. He was going over, step by step, the technic of an operation he had seen that afternoon, weighing, considering, even criticizing. His conclusion, reached as he brushed back his hair and put away his sewing implements, was somewhat to the effect that he could have done a better piece of work with his eyes shut and his hands tied behind his back; and that if it were not for the wealth of material to work on he’d pack up and go home. Which brought him back to Harmony and his new responsibility. He took off the necktie he had absently put on and hunted out a better one.

He was late at supper—an offense that brought a scowl from the head of the table, a scowl that he met with a cheerful smile. Harmony was already in her place. Seated between a little Bulgarian and a Jewish student from Galicia, she was almost immediately struggling in a sea of language, into which she struck out now and then tentatively, only to be again submerged. Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly, aware of the sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did not understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and failing that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of the day. Her bright color faded; her eyes looked tragic and rather aloof. She ate almost nothing, and left the table before the others had finished.

What curious little dramas of the table are played under unseeing eyes! What small tragedies begin with the soup and end with dessert! What heartaches with a salad! Small tragedies of averted eyes, looking away from appealing ones; lips that tremble with wretchedness nibbling daintily at a morsel; smiles that sear; foolish bits of talk that mean nothing except to one, and to that one everything! Harmony, freezing at Peter’s formal bow and gazing obstinately ahead during the rest of the meal, or no nearer Peter than the red-paper roses, and Peter, showering the little Bulgarian next to her with detestable German in the hope of a glance. And over all the odor of cabbage salad, and the “Nicht Rauchen” sign, and an acrimonious discussion on eugenics between an American woman doctor named Gates and a German matron who had had fifteen children, and who reduced every general statement to a personal insult.

Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed, and she was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one. Defiantly, too, had he only known it, her small chin up and her color high again; playing the “Humoresque,” of all things, in the hope, of course, that he would hear it and guess from her choice the wild merriment of her mood. Peter rapped once or twice, but obtained no answer, save that the “Humoresque” rose a bit higher; and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he was forced to light a cigarette to cover his pausing.

Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman of forty or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a masculine disregard of clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let him help her into her ulster.

“New girl, eh?” she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door. “Very gay, isn’t she, to have just finished a supper like that! Honestly, Peter, what are we going to do?”

“Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better food, but not for our terms.”

Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put it on with a single jerk down over her hair.

“Oh, darn money, anyhow!” she said. “Come and walk to the corner with me. I have a lecture.”

Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his room. There, on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he wrote—

“Are you ill? Or have I done anything?”

P. B.”

This with great care he was pushing under Harmony’s door when the little Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said nothing, nor did Peter, who rose and dusted his knees. The little Bulgarian spoke no English and little German. Between them was the wall of language. But higher than. this barrier was the understanding of their common sex. He held out his hand, still smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took it. Then he followed the woman doctor down the stairs.

To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be absurd. She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl attracts an unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that he feared he had offended her, than he would have been without this fillip to his interest. But even his concern did not prevent his taking copious and intelligent notes at his lecture that night, or interfere with his enjoyment of the Stein of beer with which, after it was over, he washed down its involved German.

The engagement at Stewart’s irked him somewhat. He did not approve of Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of fineness in the man himself—an intangible thing that seems to be a matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container.

Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked to Stewart’s apartment together. The frosty air and the rapid exercise combined to drive away Byrne’s irritation; that, and the recollection that it was Saturday night and that to-morrow there would be no clinics, no lectures, no operations; that the great shambles would be closed down and that priests would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was whistling as he walked along.

Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped under a street light to consult his watch.

“Almost ten!” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart.”

“Oh, that’s all right. She knows you’re playing poker?”

“Yes. She doesn’t object to poker. It’s the other. You can’t make a good woman understand that sort of thing.”

“Thank God for that!”

After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the “Humoresque.”

Stewart’s apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was to be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights were still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs and, for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced as out of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.

“‘Out of order’!” he observed. “Out of order since last spring, judging by that card. Vorwarts!”

They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God’s country Boyer played golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to forswear the more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular development that his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails, without an ounce of fat, and he climbed the long steep flights with an elasticity that left even Boyer a step or so behind.

Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the sound of beer mugs on wood.

Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men bowed ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and bowing from the waist. Byrne sniffed.

“What do I smell, Marie?” he demanded. “Surely not sausages!”

Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old friend. It was always sausages.

“Sausages, of a truth—fat ones.’

“But surely not with mustard?”

“Ach, ja—englisch mustard.”

Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on Byrne’s arm.

“I was very angry with you to-day.”

“With me?”

Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart’s unconventional menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart’s custom of addressing Marie in English, while she replied in her own tongue.

“Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein’s hat, and you—She is rich, so?”

“I really don’t know. I think not.”

“And good?”

“Yes, of course.”

Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking up at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard. Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age and experience. She had put on a white dress, cut out at the neck, and above her collarbones were small, cuplike hollows. She was very thin.

“I was sad to-night,” she said plaintively. “I wished to jump out the window.”

Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.

“And I made you feel like that?”

“Not you—the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I—” She stopped tragically, then sniffled.

“The sausages!” she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting-room.

Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of clinical material. The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing, offered unlimited choice of cases. The contempt for human life of overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness of the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies that others may live.

Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.

His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the narrow means at his control he had the choice of two alternatives: To live, as Byrne was living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in winter, starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.

The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense of water on tap, and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with premeditation and forethought one might bathe. The room had once been a fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at the same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub sizzled if one touched it.

Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a bedroom; the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress, which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again, opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room, now in chaotic disorder.

Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men already there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace Hunter, doing research work at the general hospital, and a young piano student from Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been already dealt, and Byrne stood by waiting for the hand to be played.

The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority. It was a regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the beer that sat in Steins on the floor beside each man, or as Marie’s boiled Wiener sausages.

The blue chips represented a Krone, the white ones five Hellers. MacLean, who was hardly more than a boy, was winning, drawing in chips with quick gestures of his long pianist’s fingers.

Byrne sat down and picked up his cards. Stewart was staying out, and so, after a glance, did he. The other three drew cards and fell to betting. Stewart leaned back and filled his long pipe, and after a second’s hesitation Byrne turned to him.

“I don’t know just what to say, Stewart,” he began in an undertone. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt Marie, but—”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Stewart drew at his pipe and bent forward to watch the game with an air of ending the discussion.

“Not at all. I did hurt her and I want to explain. Marie has been kind to me, and I like her. You know that.”

“Don’t be an ass!” Stewart turned on him sharply. “Marie is a little fool, that’s all. I didn’t know it was an American girl.”

Byrne played in bad luck. His mind was not on the cards. He stayed out of the last hand, and with a cigarette wandered about the room. He glanced into the tidy bedroom and beyond, to where Marie hovered over the stove.

She turned and saw him.

“Come,” she called. “Watch the supper for me while I go down for more beer.”

“But no,” he replied, imitating her tone. “Watch the supper for me while I go down for more beer.”

“I love thee,” she called merrily. “Tell the Herr Doktor I love thee. And here is the pitcher.”

When he returned the supper was already laid in the little kitchen. The cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace Hunter were replacing the cover and the lamp on the card-table. Stewart was orating from a pinnacle of proprietorship.

“Exactly,” he was saying, in reply to something gone before; “I used to come here Saturday nights—used to come early and take a bath. Worthington had rented it furnished for a song. Used to sit in a corner and envy Worthington his bathtub, and that lamp there, and decent food, and a bed that didn’t suffer from necrosis in the center. Then when he was called home I took it.”

“Girl and all, wasn’t it?”

“Girl and all. Old Worth said she was straight, and, by Jove, she is. He came back last fall on his wedding trip—he married a wealthy girl and came to see us. I was out, but Marie was here. There was the deuce to pay.”

He lowered his voice. The men had gathered about him in a group.

“Jealous, eh?” from Hunter.

“Jealous? No! He tried to kiss her and she hit him—said he didn’t respect her!”

“It’s a curious code of honor,” said Boyer thoughtfully. And indeed to none but Stewart did it seem amusing. This little girl of the streets, driven by God knows what necessity to make her own code and, having made it, living up to it with every fiber of her.

“Bitte zum speisen!” called Marie gayly from her brick stove, and the men trooped out to the kitchen.

The supper was spread on the table, with the pitcher of beer in the center. There were Swiss cheese and cold ham and rolls, and above all sausages and mustard. Peter drank a great deal of beer, as did the others, and sang German songs with a frightful accent and much vigor and sentiment, as also did the others.

Then he went back to the cold room in the Pension Schwarz, and told himself he was a fool to live alone when one could live like a prince for the same sum properly laid out. He dropped into the hollow center of his bed, where his big figure fitted as comfortably as though it lay in a washtub, and before his eyes there came a vision of Stewart’s flat and the slippers by the fire—which was eminently human.

However, a moment later he yawned, and said aloud, with considerable vigor, that he ‘d be damned if he would—which was eminently Peter Byrne. Almost immediately, with the bed coverings, augmented by his overcoat, drawn snug to his chin, and the better necktie swinging from the gasjet in the air from the opened window, Peter was asleep. For four hours he had entirely forgotten Harmony.

CHAPTER V

The peace of a gray Sunday morning hung like a cloud over the little Pension Schwarz. In the kitchen the elderly maid, with a shawl over her shoulders and stiffened fingers, made the fire, while in the dining-room the little chambermaid cut butter and divided it sparingly among a dozen breakfast trays—on each tray two hard rolls, a butter pat, a plate, a cup. On two trays Olga, with a glance over her shoulder, placed two butter pats. The mistress yet slept, but in the kitchen Katrina had a keen eye for butter—and a hard heart.

Katrina came to the door.

“The hot water is ready,” she announced. “And the coffee also. Hast thou been to mass?”

“Ja.”

“That is a lie.” This quite on general principle, it being one of the cook’s small tyrannies to exact religious observance from her underling, and one of Olga’s Sunday morning’s indulgences to oversleep and avoid the mass. Olga took the accusation meekly and without reply, being occupied at that moment in standing between Katrina and the extra pats of butter.

“For the lie,” said Katrina calmly, “thou shalt have no butter this morning. There, the Herr Doktor rings for water. Get it, wicked one!”

Katrina turned slowly in the doorway.

“The new Fraulein is American?”

“Ja.”

Katrina shrugged her shoulders.

“Then I shall put more water to heat,” she said resignedly. ” The Americans use much water. God knows it cannot be healthy!”

Olga filled her pitcher from the great copper kettle and stood with it poised in her thin young arms.

“The new Fraulein is very beautiful,” she continued aloud. “Thinkest thou it is the hot water?”

“Is an egg more beautiful for being boiled?” demanded Katrina. “Go, and be less foolish. See, it is not the Herr Doktor who rings, but the new American.”

Olga carried her pitcher to Harmony’s door, and being bidden, entered. The room was frigid and Harmony, at the window in her nightgown, was closing the outer casement. The inner still swung open. Olga, having put down her pitcher, shivered.

“Surely the Fraulein has not slept with open windows?”

“Always with open windows.” Harmony having secured the inner casement, was wrapping herself in the blue silk kimono with the faded butterflies. Merely to look at it made Olga shiver afresh. She shook her head.

“But the air of the night,” she said, “it is full of mists and illnesses! Will you have breakfast now?”

“In ten minutes, after I have bathed.”

Olga having put a match to the stove went back to the kitchen, shaking her head.

“They are strange, the Americans!” she said to latrine. “And if to be lovely one must bathe daily, and sleep with open windows—”

Harmony had slept soundly after all. Her pique at Byrne had passed with the reading of his note, and the sensation of his protection and nearness had been almost physical. In the virginal little apartment in the lodge of Maria Theresa the only masculine presence had been that of the Portier, carrying up coals at ninety Hellers a bucket, or of the accompanist who each alternate day had played for the Big Soprano to practice. And they had felt no deprivation, except for those occasional times when Scatchy developed a reckless wish to see the interior of a dancing-hall or one of the little theaters that opened after the opera.

But, as calmly as though she had never argued alone with a cabman or disputed the bill at the delicatessen shop, Harmony had thrown herself on the protection of this shabby big American whom she had met but once, and, having done so, slept like a baby. Not, of course, that she realized her dependence. She had felt very old and experienced and exceedingly courageous as she put out her light the night before and took a flying leap into the bed. She was still old and experienced, if a trifle less courageous, that Sunday morning.

Promptly in ten minutes Olga brought the breakfast, two rolls, two pats of butter—shades of the sleeping mistress and Katrina the thrifty—and a cup of coffee. On the tray was a bit of paper torn from a notebook:—

“Part of the prescription is an occasional walk in good company. Will you walk with me this afternoon? I would come in person to ask you, but am spending the morning in my bathrobe, while my one remaining American suit is being pressed.

“P. B.”

Harmony got the ink and her pen from her trunk and wrote below:—

“You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.

“H. W.”

When frequent slamming of doors and steps along the passageway told Harmony that the pension was fully awake, she got out her violin. The idea of work obsessed her. Tomorrow there would be the hunt for something to do to supplement her resources, this afternoon she had rashly promised to walk. The morning, then, must be given up to work. But after all she did little.

For an hour, perhaps, she practiced. The little Bulgarian paused outside her door and listened, rapt, his eyes closed. Peter Byrne, listening while he sorted lecture memoranda at his little table in bathrobe and slippers, absently filed the little note with the others—where he came across it months later—next to a lecture on McBurney’s Point, and spent a sad hour or so over it. Over all the sordid little pension, with its odors of food and stale air, its spotted napery and dusty artificial flowers, the music hovered, and made for the time all things lovely.

In her room across from Harmony’s, Anna Gates was sewing, or preparing to sew. Her hair in a knob, her sleeves rolled up, the room in violent disorder, she was bending over the bed, cutting savagely at a roll of pink flannel. Because she was working with curved surgeon’s scissors, borrowed from Peter, the cut edges were strangely scalloped. Her method as well as her tools was unique. Clearly she was intent on a body garment, for now and then she picked up the flannel and held it to her. Having thus, as one may say, got the line of the thing, she proceeded to cut again, jaw tight set, small veins on her forehead swelling, a small replica of Peter Byrne sewing a button on his coat.

After a time it became clear to her that her method was wrong. She rolled up the flannel viciously and flung it into a corner, and proceeded to her Sunday morning occupation of putting away the garments she had worn during the week, a vast and motley collection.

On the irritability of her mood Harmony’s music had a late but certain effect. She made a toilet, a trifle less casual than usual, seeing that she put on her stays, and rather sheepishly picked up the bundle from the corner. She hunted about for a thimble, being certain she had brought one from home a year before, but failed to find it. And finally, bundle under her arm and smiling, she knocked at Harmony’s door.

“Would you mind letting me sit with you?” she asked. “I’ll not stir. I want to sew, and my room is such a mess!”

Harmony threw the door wide. “You will make me very happy, if only my practicing does not disturb you.”

Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.

“I’ll probably be the disturbing element,” she said. “I’m a noisy sewer.”

Harmony’s immaculate room and radiant person put her in good humor immediately. She borrowed a thimble—not because she cared whether she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a part of the game—and settled herself in a corner, her ragged pieces in her lap. For an hour she plodded along and Harmony played. Then the girl put down her bow and turned to the corner. The little doctor was jerking at a knot in her thread.

“It’s in the most damnable knot!” she said, and Harmony was suddenly aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.

“Please don’t pay any attention to me,” she implored. “I hate to sew. That’s the trouble. Or perhaps it’s not all the trouble. I’m a fool about music.”

“Perhaps, if you hate to sew—”

“I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had any children!”

Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was smiling up through her glasses.

“The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I’m really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food’s bad and I can’t afford to live anywhere else. I’d take a room and do my own cooking, but what time have I?” She spread out the pieces of flannel on her knee. “Does this look like anything to you?”

“A petticoat, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t intend it as a petticoat.”

“I thought, on account of the scallops—”

“Scallops!” Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.

“Scallops!” she gasped at last. “Oh, my dear, if you’d seen me cutting ‘em! And with Peter Byrne’s scissors!”

Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to Peter—Peter’s future, Peter’s poverty, Peter’s refusing to have his hair cut, Peter’s encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel Peter almost fought. It developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had the choice of weapons, and had chosen fists, and that the major had been carried away. Dr. Gates grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back on the pink flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces, united, were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the hospital. “Although,” she commented, “it looks more like a chair cover.”

Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined with a piece of her mother’s wedding dress. And as she straightened the crooked edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the mother who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart. And soon, by dint of skillful listening, which is always better than questioning, the faded little woman doctor knew all the story.

She was rather aghast.

“But suppose you cannot find anything to do?”

“I must,” simply.

“It’s such a terrible city for a girl alone.”

“I’m not really alone. I know you now.”

“An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!”

“And there is Peter Byrne.”

“Peter!” Dr. Gates sniffed. “Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any comparison in destitution!”

Harmony stiffened a trifle.

“Of course I do not mean money,” she said. “There are such things as encouragement, and—and friendliness.”

“One cannot eat encouragement,” retorted Dr. Gates sagely. “And friendliness between you and any man—bah! Even Peter is only human, my dear.”

“I am sure he is very good.”

“So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I’m a skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don’t fall in love with him. It will be years before he can marry. And don’t let him fall in love with you. He probably will.”

Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare for lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that a headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised. Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.

Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner she repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for the sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty. For illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the spiritual, the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of general practice, had come to view life along physiological lines.

With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.

“I’ve been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as usual.”

“Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life—”

“About you, as a representative member of your sex. I’m a fool.”

Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and his best tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather stern.

“To whom?”

“To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this moment she thinks you are everything you shouldn’t be, because I said you were only human. Why it should be evil to be human, or human to be evil—”

“I cannot imagine,” said Peter slowly, “the reason for any conversation about me.”

“Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things, but it always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in common. Then she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world was good, everybody was good. She would find a safe occupation and all would be well.”

“So you warned her against me,” said Peter grimly.

“I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I make ‘way with myself?”

“Cui bono?” demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. “The mischief is done.”

Dr. Gates looked up at him.

“I’m in love with you myself, Peter!” she said gratefully. “Perhaps it is the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?”

CHAPTER VI

A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in cold water that evening and obeyed little Olga’s “Bitte sum speisen.” The chairs round the diningtable were only half occupied—a free concert had taken some, Sunday excursions others. The little Bulgarian, secretly considered to be a political spy, was never about on this one evening of the week. Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports of what he had learned during the week—his gleanings from near-by tables in coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours after midnight in the cafe, where the Austrian military was wont to gather and drink.

Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure, and met a tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table Frau Schwarz was talking volubly—as if, by mere sound, to distract attention from the scantiness of the meal. Under cover of the Babel Peter spoke to the girl. Having had his warning his tone was friendly, without a hint of the intimacy of the day before.

“Better?”

“Not entirely. Somewhat.”

“I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to suffer from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help them.”

“I am afraid of headache tablets.”

“Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!”

This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all, what had she to do with the man himself? He had constituted himself her physician. That was all.

“The next time I shall send Olga.”

“Good!” he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal as he might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful indifference, her new-growing confidence.

It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a cigarette—according to the custom of the pension, which accorded the “Nicht Rauchen” sign the same attention that it did to the portrait of the deceased Herr Schwarz—that he turned to her again.

“I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night.”

Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had nerved herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.

“Then you do not prescribe air?”

“That’s up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don’t mind my going along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven’t anything else to do.”

Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table, gave Peter a swift glance of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He was rather exultant himself; certainly he had been adroit.

“I’d rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep,” said Harmony, who had missed the by-play. “And Old Dog Tray would be a very nice companion, I’m sure.”

It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter had she followed the two in their rambling walk that night. Direction mattering little and companionship everything, they wandered on, talking of immaterial things—of the rough pavements, of the shop windows, of the gray medieval buildings. They came to a full stop in front of the Votivkirche, and discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the Benk sculptures on the facade. And there in the open square, casting diplomacy to the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out what was in his heart.

“Look here,” he said, “you don’t care a rap about spires. I don’t believe you know anything about them. I don’t. What did that idiot of a woman doctor say to you to-day?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do very well. And I’m going to set you right. She starts out with two premises: I’m a man, and you’re young and attractive. Then she draws some sort of fool deduction. You know what I mean?”

“I don’t see why we need discuss it,” said poor Harmony. “Or how you know—”

“I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and she came to me. I don’t know whether it makes any difference to you or not, but—we’d started out so well, and then to have it spoiled! My dear girl, you are beautiful and I know it. That’s all the more reason why, if you’ll stand for it, you need some one to look after you—I’ll not say like a brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor brothers to their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and who isn’t going to fall in love with you.”

“I didn’t think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you to.”

“Certainly not. Besides, I—” Here Peter Byrne had another inspiration, not so good as the first—“Besides, there is somebody at home, you understand? That makes it all right, doesn’t it?”

“A girl at home?”

“A girl,” said Peter, lying manfully.

“How very nice!” said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers and street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to themselves. Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked blissful personalities, Harmony’s future, Peter’s career, money—or its lack—their ambitions, their hopes, even—and here was intimacy, indeed!—their disappointments, their failures of courage, their occasional loss of faith in themselves.

The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took on, against the gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for an occasional pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the streets were deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl rejected his offer of a taxicab.

“We should be home too quickly,” she observed naively. “And we have so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English lessons in the afternoon and working all morning at my music—”

And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely, his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very slender her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.

Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep into his soul that night.

Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned in at the little street, a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided with Harmony. He was a short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled mustache, and he was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin heart in his voice, the barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann. He saw Harmony, and still singing planted himself in her path. When Byrne would have pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.

“It is only the Portier from the lodge,” she said.

The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering note, stood before Harmony, bowing.

“The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad,” he said thickly. “There is no more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier from Salzburg who has only one lung.”

“But think!” Harmony said in German. “No more practicing in the early dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed hall! It is better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!”

Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with caution and bowed after them.

“Gute Nacht,” he called. “Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and the salon and a bath of the finest.”

As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing his unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door of the Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.

“Do you mind if I ask one question?”

“You honor me, madam.”

“Then—what is the name of the girl back home?”

Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to feminine names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he recalled:—

“Emma.”

“Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!” But there was a touch of disappointment in her voice.

Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a grain of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had been right—she had the real thing.

The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening itself to an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady secretary in the anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the old man to one of his rare enthusiasms.

“Six months,” he said, “and you will go back to your America and show them how over here we teach violin. I will a letter—letters— give you, and you shall put on the programme, of your concerts that you are my pupil, is it not so?”

Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a little with the praise and excitement.

“If I can stay so long,” she answered unsteadily.

“You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is finished you talk of going! Gott im Himmel!”

“It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find something to do I shall have to go back.”

The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to rouse his ire against a world that had money for everything but music. He spent five minutes in indignant protest, then:—

“But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to stay. Perhaps I can now and then find a concert for you.” It was a lure he had thrown out before, a hook without a bait. It needed no bait, being always eagerly swallowed. And no more talk of going away. I refuse to allow. You shall not go.”

Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was interested. He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty Kronen is fifty Kronen, and South American beef is high of price. He followed Harmony into the outer room and bowed her out of his studio.

“The Fraulein has paid?” he demanded, turning sharply to the lady secretary.

“Always.”

“After the lesson?”

“Ja, Herr Professor.”

“It is better,” said the master, “that she pay hereafter before the lesson.”

“Ja, Herr Professor.”

Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony’s name. There were many such crosses on the ledger.

CHAPTER VII

For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the morning, hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the moment it was over. He had lectures in the evenings, too, and although he lingered for an hour or so after supper it was to find Harmony taken possession of by the little Bulgarian, seized with a sudden thirst for things American.

On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed and helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the little Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne flung down the stairs and out into the street, almost colliding with Stewart.

They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling gait of the man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy, rather solid tread. The two men were not congenial, and the frequent intervals without speech between them were rather for lack of understanding than for that completeness of it which often fathers long silences. Byrne was the first to speak after their greeting.

“Marie all right?”

“Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this week.”

“Thanks. Does it matter which night?”

“Any but Thursday. We’re hearing ‘La Boheme.’”

“Say Friday, then.”

Byrne’s tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner mood failed to notice it.

“Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other night?”

“What was that?”

Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.

“Wake up, Byrne !” he said. “You remember well enough. Neither the Days nor any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you go on living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz’s. It is the double drain there that tells on one—eating little and being eaten much. Those old walls are full of vermin. Why don’t you take our apartment?”

“Yours?”

“Yes, for a couple of months. I’m through with Schleich and Breidau can’t take me for two months. It’s Marie’s off season and we’re going to Semmering for the winter sports. We’re ahead enough to take a holiday. And if you want the flat for the same amount you are spending now, or less, you can have it, and—a home, old man.”

Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer tempted him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.

“Thanks,” he said. “I think not.”

“Oh, all right.” Stewart was rather offended. “I can’t do more than give you a chance.”

They separated shortly after and Byrne went on alone. The snow of Sunday had turned to a fine rain which had lasted all of Monday and Tuesday. The sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of the streets; and the smoke from the little stoves in the street-cars followed them in depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen sat and smoked in the interior of musty cabs. The women hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses as they worked.

Byrne walked along, his head thrust down into his upturned collar; moisture gathered on his face like dew, condensed rather than precipitated. And as he walked there came before him a vision of the little flat on the Hochgasse, with the lamp on the table, and the general air of warmth and cheer, and a figure presiding over the brick stove in the kitchen. Byrne shook himself like a great dog and turned in at the gate of the hospital. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself.

That week was full of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she turned she faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an interest that frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat helplessly against barriers of language, of strange customs, of stolidity that were not far from absolute cruelty.

She held to her determination, however, at first with hope, then, as the pension in advance and the lessons at fifty Kronen—also in advance,—went on, recklessly. She played marvelously those days, crying out through her violin the despair she had sealed her lips against. On Thursday, playing for the master, she turned to find him flourishing his handkerchief, and went home in a sort of daze, incredulous that she could have moved him to tears.

The little Bulgarian was frankly her slave now. He had given up the coffee-houses that he might spend that hour near her, on the chance of seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At night in the Cafe Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows on the table, a bottle of native wine before him, and dreamed of her. He was very fat, the little Georgiev, very swarthy, very pathetic. The Balkan kettle was simmering in those days, and he had been set to watch the fire. But instead he had kindled a flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray words, odd glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman’s hair behind her ears. For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that made even that grim official smile.

Harmony was quite unconscious. She went on her way methodically: so many hours of work, so many lessons at fifty Kronen, so many afternoons searching for something to do, making rounds of shops where her English might be valuable.

And after a few weeks Peter Byrne found time to help. After one experience, when Harmony left a shop with flaming face and tears in her eyes, he had thought it best to go with her. The first interview, under Peter’s grim eyes, was a failure. The shopkeeper was obviously suspicious of Peter. After that, whenever he could escape from clinics, Peter went along, but stayed outside, smoking his eternal cigarette, and keeping a watchful eye on things inside the shop.

Only once was he needed. At that time, suspecting that all was not well, from the girl’s eyes and the leer on the shopkeeper’s face, he had opened the door in time to hear enough. He had lifted the proprietor bodily and flung him with a crash into a glass showcase of ornaments for the hair. Then, entirely cheerful and happy, and unmolested by the frightened clerks, he led Harmony outside and in a sort of atavistic triumph bought her a bunch of valley lilies.

Nevertheless, in his sane moments, Peter knew that things were very bad, indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He analyzed his own feeling very carefully, and that was his conclusion. Nevertheless he did a quixotic thing—which was Peter, of course, all over.

He took supper with Stewart and Marie on Friday, and the idea came to him there. Hardly came to him, being Marie’s originally. The little flat was cozy and bright. Marie, having straightened her kitchen, brought in a waist she was making and sat sewing while the two men talked. Their conversation was technical, a new extirpation of the thyroid gland, a recent nephrectomy.

In her curious way Marie liked Peter and respected him. She struggled with the technicalities of their talk as she sewed, finding here and there a comprehensive bit. At those times she sat, needle poised, intelligent eyes on the speakers, until she lost herself again in the mazes of their English.

At ten o’clock she rose and put away her sewing. Peter saw her get the stone pitcher and knew she was on her way for the evening beer. He took advantage of her absence to broach the matter of Harmony.

“She’s up against it, as a matter of fact,” he finished. “It ought to be easy enough for her to find something, but it isn’t.”

“I hardly saw her that day in the coffee-house; but she’s rather handsome, isn’t she?”

“That’s one of the difficulties. Yes.”

Stewart smoked and reflected. “No friends here at all?”

“None. There were three girls at first. Two have gone home.”

“Could she teach violin?”

“I should think so.”

“Aren’t there any kids in the American colony who want lessons? There’s usually some sort of infant prodigy ready to play at any entertainments of the Doctors’ Club.”

“They don’t want an American teacher, I fancy; but I suppose I could put a card up in the club rooms. Damn it all!” cried Peter with a burst of honest resentment, “why do I have to be poor?”

“If you were rolling in gold you could hardly offer her money, could you?”

Peter had not thought of that before. It was the only comfort he found in his poverty. Marie had brought in the beer and was carefully filling the mugs. “Why do you not marry her?” she asked unexpectedly. “Then you could take this flat. We are going to Semmering for the winter sports. I would show her about the stove.”

“Marry her, of course!” said Peter gravely. “Just pick her up and carry her to church! The trifling fact that she does not wish to marry me need have nothing to do with it.”

“Ah, but does she not wish it?” demanded Marie. “Are you so certain, stupid big one? Do not women always love you?”

Ridiculous as the thought was, Peter pondered it as he went back to the Pension Schwarz. About himself he was absurdly modest, almost humble. It had never occurred to him that women might care for him for himself. In his struggling life there had been little time for women. But about himself as the solution of a problem—that was different.

He argued the thing over. In the unlikely contingency of the girl’s being willing, was Stewart right—could two people live as cheaply as one? Marie was an Austrian and knew how to manage—that was different. And another thing troubled him. He dreaded to disturb the delicate adjustment of their relationship; the terra incognita of a young girl’s mind daunted him. There was another consideration which he put resolutely in the back of his mind—his career. He had seen many a promising one killed by early marriage, men driven to the hack work of the profession by the scourge of financial necessity. But that was a matter of the future; the necessity was immediate.

The night was very cold. Gusts of wind from the snow-covered Schneeberg drove along the streets, making each corner a fortress defended by the elements, a battlement to be seized, lost, seized again. Peter Byrne battled valiantly but mechanically. And as he fought he made his decision.

He acted with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was afraid of the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity might prevail, and in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of his position. He almost ran up the winding staircase. At the top his cold fingers fumbled the key and he swore under his breath. He slammed the door behind him. Peter always slammed doors, and had an apologetic way of opening the door again and closing it gently, as if to show that he could. Harmony’s room was dark, but he had surprised her once into a confession that when she was very downhearted she liked to sit in the dark and be very blue indeed. So he stopped and knocked. There was no reply, but from Dr. Gates’s room across there came a hum of conversation. He knew at once that Harmony was there.

Peter hardly hesitated. He took off his soft hat and ran a hand over his hair, and he straightened his tie. These preliminaries to a proposal of marriage being disposed of, he rapped at the door.

Anna Gates opened it. She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and in deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with pins, and pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was still under way.

“Peter!” she cried. “Come in and get warm.”

Harmony, in the blue kimono, gave a little gasp, and flung round her shoulders the mass of pink on which she had been working.

“Please go out!” she said. “I am not dressed.”

“You are covered,” returned Anna Gates. “That’s all that any sort of clothing can do. Don’t mind her, Peter, and sit on the bed. Look out for pins!”

Peter, however, did not sit down. He stood just inside the closed door and stared at Harmony—Harmony in the red light from the little open door of the stove; Harmony in blue and pink and a bit of white petticoat; Harmony with her hair over her shoulders and tied out of her eyes with an encircling band of rosy flannel.

“Do sit!” cried Anna Gates. “You fill the room so. Bless you, Peter, what a collar!”

No man likes to know his collar is soiled, especially on the eve of proposing marriage to a pink and blue and white vision. Peter, seated now on the bed, writhed.

“I rapped at Miss Wells’s door,” he said. “You were not there.”

This last, of course, to Harmony.

Anna Gates sniffed.

“Naturally!”

“I had something to say to you. I—I dare say it is hardly pension etiquette for you to go over to your room and let me say it there?”

Harmony smiled above the flannel.

“Could you call it through the door?”

“Hardly.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Dr. Gates, rising. “I’ll go over, of course, but not for long. There’s no fire.”

With her hand on the knob, however, Harmony interfered.

“Please!” she implored. “I am not dressed and I’d rather not.” She turned to Peter. “You can say it before her, can’t you? She—I have told her all about things.”

Peter hesitated. He felt ridiculous for the second time that night. Then:—

“It was merely an idea I had. I saw a little apartment furnished—you could learn to use the stove, unless, of course, you don’t like housekeeping—and food is really awfully cheap. Why, at these delicatessen places and bakeshops—”

Here he paused for breath and found Dr. Gates’s quizzical glance fixed on him, and Harmony’s startled eyes.

“What I am trying to say,” he exploded, “is that I believe if you would marry me it would solve some of your troubles anyhow.” He was talking for time now, against Harmony’s incredulous face. “You’d be taking on others, of course. I’m not much and I’m as poor—well, you know. It—it was the apartment that gave me the idea—”

“And the stove!” said Harmony; and suddenly burst into joyous laughter. After a rather shocked instant Dr. Gates joined her. It was real mirth with Harmony, the first laugh of days, that curious laughter of women that is not far from tears.

Peter sat on the bed uncomfortably. He grinned sheepishly and made a last feeble attempt to stick to his guns.

“I mean it. You know I’m not in love with you or you with me, of course. But we are such a pair of waifs, and I thought we might get along. Lord knows I need some one to look after me!”

“And Emma?”

“There is no Emma. I made her up.”

Harmony sobered at that.

“It is only”—she gasped a little for breath—“it is only your—your transparency, Peter.” It was the first time she had called him Peter. “You know how things are with me and you want to help me, and out of your generosity you are willing to take on another burden. Oh, Peter!”

And here, Harmony being an emotional young person, the tears beat the laughter to the surface and had to be wiped away under the cover of mirth.

Anna Gates, having recovered herself, sat back and surveyed them both sternly through her glasses.

“Once for all,” she said brusquely, “let such foolishness end. Peter, I am ashamed of you. Marriage is not for you—not yet, not for a dozen years. Any man can saddle himself with a wife; not every man can be what you may be if you keep your senses and stay single. And the same is true for you, girl. To tide over a bad six months you would sacrifice the very thing you are both struggling for?”

“I’m sure we don’t intend to do it,” replied Harmony meekly.

“Not now. Some day you may be tempted. When that time comes, remember what I say. Matrimonially speaking, each of you is fatal to the other. Now go away and let me alone. I’m not accustomed to proposals of marriage.”

It was in some confusion of mind that Peter Byrne took himself off to the bedroom with the cold tiled stove and the bed that was as comfortable as a washtub. Undeniably he was relieved. Also Harmony’s problem was yet unsolved. Also she had called him Peter.

Also he had said he was not in love with her. Was he so sure of that?

At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had managed to warm the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off, Anna Gates knocked at his door.

“Yes?” said Peter, still comfortably asleep.

“It is Dr. Gates.”

“Sorry, Doctor—have to ‘xcuse me,” mumbled Peter from the blanket.

“Peter!”

Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up in bed.

“Well?”

“Open the door just a crack.”

Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the coverings up to retain as much heat as possible. An icy blast from the open window blew round him, setting everything movable in the little room to quivering. He fumbled in the dark for his slippers, failed to find them, and yawning noisily went to the door.

Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside. Her short, graying hair was out of its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising six-inch plait down her back. She had no glasses, and over the candle-frame she peered shortsightedly at Peter.

“It’s about Jimmy,” she said. “I don’t know what’s got into me, but I’ve forgotten for three days. It’s a good bit more than time for a letter.”

“Great Scott!”

“Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted a little. The nurse found him crying.”

“The poor little devil!” said Peter contritely. “Overdue, is it? I’ll fix it to-night.”

“Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning. I’m off at seven.”

“The envelope?”

“Here it is. And take my candle. I’m going to bed.”

That was at midnight or shortly after. Half after one struck from the twin clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the Stephansplatz across the city. It found Peter with the window closed, sitting up in bed, a candle balanced on one knee, a writing-tablet on the other.

He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he had taken part that day, including a detailed description of the quarry, which weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty pounds, Peter being strong on imagination and short on facts as regards the Alpine chamois. Then, trying to read the letter from a small boy’s point of view and deciding that it lacked snap, he added by way of postscript a harrowing incident of avalanche, rope, guide, and ice axe. He ended in a sort of glow of authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off the chamois.

The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to Jimmy Conroy—an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic, bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny village in the Austrian Tyrol.

It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled himself to sleep.

It was just two o’clock when the night nurse, making rounds in her ward in the general hospital, found a small boy very much awake on his pillow,and taking off her felt slipper shook it at him in pretended fury.

“Now, thou bad one!” she said. “Awake, when the Herr Doktor orders sleep! Shall I use the slipper?”

The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.

“I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein Elisabet said that in the mountains there are accidents, and that sometimes—”

“The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool. Tomorrow comes thy letter of a certainty. The post has been delayed with great snows. Thy father has perhaps captured a great boar, or a—a chamois, and he writes of it.”

“Do chamois have horns?”

“Ja. Great horns—so.”

“He will send them to me! And there are no accidents?”

“None. Now sleep, or—the slipper.”

CHAPTER VIII

So far Harmony’s small world in the old city had consisted of Scatchy and the Big Soprano, Peter, and Anna Gates, with far off in the firmament the master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had gone, weeping anxious postcards from every way station it is true, but never theless gone. Peter and Anna Gates remained, and the master as long as her funds held out. To them now she was about to add Jimmy.

The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little doctor’s chaos of pink flannel Harmony had brought order. The result, masculine and complete even to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to be presented. It was with mingled emotions that Anna Gates wrapped it up and gave it to Harmony the next morning.

“He hasn’t been so well the last day or two,” she said. “He doesn’t sleep much—that’s the worst of those heart conditions. Sometimes, while I’ve been working on this thing, I’ve wondered—Well, we’re making a fight anyhow. And better take the letter, too, Harry. I might forget and make lecture notes on it, and if I spoil that envelope—”

Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the hospital, meeting the doctor there after her early clinic. She knew Jimmy’s little story quite well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.

“Just one of the tragedies of the world, my dear,” she had finished. “You think you have a tragedy, but you have youth and hope; I think I have my own little tragedy, because I have to go through the rest of life alone, when taken in time I’d have been a good wife and mother. Still I have my work. But this little chap, brought over here by a father who hoped to see him cured, and spent all he had to bring him here, and then—died. It gets me by the throat.”

“And the boy does not know?” Harmony had asked, her eyes wide.

“No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father is still in the mountains. When we heard about it Peter went up and saw that he was buried. It took about all the money there was. He wrote home about it, too, to the place they came from. There has never been any reply. Then ever since Peter has written these letters. Jimmy lives for them.”

Peter! It was always Peter. Peter did this. Peter said that. Peter thought thus. A very large part of Harmony’s life was Peter in those days.

She was thinking of him as she waited at the gate of the hospital for Anna Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt hair, of his letter that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his quixotic proposal of the night before. Of the proposal, most of all—it was so eminently characteristic of Peter, from the conception of the plan to its execution. Harmony’s thought of Peter was very tender that morning as she stood in the arched gateway out of reach of the wind from the Schneeberg. The tenderness and the bright color brought by the wind made her very beautiful. Little Marie, waiting across the Alserstrasse for a bus, and stamping from one foot to the other to keep warm, recognized and admired her. After all, the American women were chic, she decided, although some of the doctors had wives of a dowdiness—Himmel! And she could copy the Fraulein’s hat for two Kronen and a bit of ribbon she possessed.

The presentation of the bathrobe was a success. Six nurses and a Dozent with a red beard stood about and watched Jimmy put into it, and the Dozent, who had been engaged for five years and could not marry because the hospital board forbade it, made a speech for Jimmy in awe-inspiring German, ending up with a poem that was intended to be funny, but that made the nurses cry. From which it will be seen that Jimmy was a great favorite.

During the ceremony, for such it was, the Germans loving a ceremony, Jimmy kept his eyes on the letter in Anna Gates’s hand and waited. That the letter had come was enough. He lay back in anticipatory joy, and let himself be talked over, and bathrobed, and his hair parted Austrian fashion and turned up over a finger, which is very Austrian indeed. He liked Harmony. The girl caught his eyes on her more than once. He interrupted the speech once to ask her just what part of the robe she had made, and whether she had made the tassel. When she admitted the tassel, his admiration became mixed with respect.

It was a bright day, for a marvel. Sunlight came through the barred window behind Jimmy’s bed, and brought into dazzling radiance the pink bathrobe, and Harmony’s eyes, and fat Nurse Elisabet’s white apron. It lay on the bedspread in great squares, outlined by the shadows of the window bars. Now and then the sentry, pacing outside, would advance as far as Jimmy’s window, and a warlike silhouette of military cap and the upper end of a carbine would appear on the coverlet. These events, however, were rare, the sentry preferring the shelter of the gateway and the odor of boiling onions from the lodge just inside.

The Dozent retired to his room for the second breakfast; the nurses went about the business of the ward; Dr. Anna Gates drew a hairpin from her hair and made a great show of opening the many times opened envelope.

“The letter at last!” she said. “Shall I read it or will you?”

“You read it. It takes me so long. I’ll read it all day, after you are gone. I always do.”

Anna Gates read the letter. She read aloud poor Peter’s first halting lines, when he was struggling against sleep and cold. They were mainly an apology for the delay. Then forgetting discomfort in the joy of creation, he became more comfortable. The account of the near-accident was wonderfully graphic; the description of the chamois was fervid, if not accurate. But consternation came with the end.

The letter apparently finished, there was yet another sheet. The doctor read on.

“For Heaven’s sake,” said Peter’s frantic postscript, “find out how much a medium-sized chamois—”

Dr. Gates stopped “—ought to weigh,” was the rest of it, “and fix it right in the letter. The kid’s too smart to be fooled and I never saw a chamois outside of a drug store. They have horns, haven’t they?”

“That’s funny!” said Jimmy Conway.

“That was one of my papers slipped in by mistake,” remarked Dr. Gates, with dignity, and flashing a wild appeal for help to Harmony.

“How did one of your papers get in when it was sealed?”

“I think,” observed Harmony, leaning forward, “that little boys must not ask too many questions, especially when Christmas is only six weeks off.”

“I know! He wants to send me the horns the way he sent me the boar’s tusks.”

For Peter, having in one letter unwisely recorded the slaughter of a boar, had been obliged to ransack Vienna for a pair of tusks. The tusks had not been so difficult. But horns!

Jimmy was contented with his solution and asked no more questions. The morning’s excitement had tired him, and he lay back. Dr. Gates went to hold a whispered consultation vith the nurse, and came back, looking grave.

The boy was asleep, holding the letter in his thin hands.

The visit to the hospital was a good thing for Harmony—to find some one worse off than she was, to satisfy that eternal desire of women to do something, however small, for some one else. Her own troubles looked very small to her that day as she left the hospital and stepped out into the bright sunshine.

She passed the impassive sentry, then turned and went back to him.

“Do you wish to do a very kind thing?” she asked in German.

Now the conversation of an Austrian sentry consists of yea, yea, and nay, nay, and not always that. But Harmony was lovely and the sun was moderating the wind. The sentry looked round; no one was near.

“What do you wish?”

“Inside that third window is a small boy and he is very ill. I do not think—perhaps he will never be well again. Could you not, now and then, pass the window? It pleases him.”

“Pass the window! But why?”

“In America we see few of our soldiers. He likes to see you and the gun.”

“Ah, the gun!” He smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an officer appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he stiffened into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the girl knew he would do as she had desired.

That day brought good luck to Harmony. The wife of one of the professors at the hospital desired English conversation at two Kronen an hour.

Peter brought the news home at noon, and that afternoon Harmony was engaged. It was little enough, but it was something. It did much more than offer her two Kronen an hour; it gave her back her self-confidence, although the immediate result was rather tragic.

The Frau Professor Bergmeister, infatuated with English and with Harmony, engaged her, and took her first two Kronen worth that afternoon. It was the day for a music-lesson. Harmony arrived five minutes late, panting, hat awry, and so full of the Frau Professor Bergmeister that she could think of nothing else.

Obedient to orders she had placed the envelope containing her fifty Kronen before the secretary as she went in. The master was out of humor. Should he, the teacher of the great Koert, be kept waiting for a chit of a girl—only, of course, he said “das Kindchen” or some other German equivalent for chit—and then have her come into the sacred presence breathless, and salute him between gasps as the Frau Professor Bergmeister?

Being excited and now confused by her error, and being also rather tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed, Harmony dropped her bow. In point of heinousness this classes with dropping one’s infant child from an upper window, or sitting on the wrong side of a carriage when with a lady.

The master, thus thrice outraged, rose slowly and glared at Harmony. Then with a lordly gesture to her to follow he stalked to the outer room, and picking up the envelope with the fifty Kronen held it out to her without a word.

Harmony’s world came crashing about her ears. She stared stupidly at the envelope in her hand, at the master’s retreating back.

Two girl students waiting their turn, envelopes in hand, giggled together. Harmony saw them and flushed scarlet. But the lady secretary touched her arm.

“It does not matter, Fraulein. He does so sometimes. Always he is sorry. You will come for your next lesson, not so? and all will be well. You are his well-beloved pupil. To-night he will not eat for grief that he has hurt you.”

The ring of sincerity in the shabby secretary’s voice was unmistakable. Her tense throat relaxed. She looked across at the two students who had laughed. They were not laughing now. Something of fellowship and understanding passed between them in the glance. After all, it was in the day’s work—would come to one of them next, perhaps. And they had much in common—the struggle, their faith, the everlasting loneliness, the little white envelopes, each with its fifty Kronen.

Vaguely comforted, but with the light gone out of her day of days, Harmony went down the three long flights and out into the brightness of the winter day.

On the Ring she almost ran into Peter. He was striding toward her, giving a definite impression of being bound for some particular destination and of being behind time. That this was not the case was shown by the celerity with which, when he saw Harmony, he turned about and walked with her.

“I had an hour or two,” he explained, “and I thought I’d walk. But walking is a social habit, like drinking. I hate to walk alone. How about the Frau Professor?”

“She has taken me on. I’m very happy. But, Dr. Byrne—”

“You called me Peter last night.”

“That was different. You had just proposed to me.”

“Oh, if that’s all that’s necessary—” He stopped in the center of the busy Ring with every evident intention of proposing again.

“Please, Peter!”

“Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?”

“She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer them.”

“For instance?”

“Well, taxes now. She’s very much interested in taxes.”

“Never owned anything taxable except a dog—and that wasn’t a tax anyhow; it was a license. Can’t you switch her on to medicine or surgery, where I’d be of some use?”

“She says to-morrow we’ll talk of the tariff and customs duties.”

“Well, I’ve got something to say on that.” He pulled from his overcoat pocket a largish bundle—Peter always bulged with packages—and held it out for her to see. “Tell the Frau Professor Bergmeister with my compliments,” he said, “that because some idiot at home sent me five pounds of tobacco, hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here, I have passed from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian customs have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty. I offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it.”

“Really, Peter?”

“Really.”

Under this lightness Harmony sensed the real anxiety. Ten dollars was fifty Kronen, and fifty Kronen was a great deal of money. She reached over and patted his arm.

“You’ll make it up in some way. Can’t you cut off some little extravagance?”

“I might cut down on my tailor bills.” He looked down at himself whimsically. “Or on ties. I’m positively reckless about ties!”

They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with that eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed on a dog-trot. Peter looked at them critically.

“Bosnians,” he observed. “Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine out of ten of them tubercular. It’s a rotten game, this military play of Europe. How’s Jimmy?”

“We left him very happy with your letter.”

Peter flushed. “I expect it was pretty poor stuff,” he apologized. “I’ve never seen the Alps except from a train window, and as for a chamois—”

“He says his father will surely send him the horns.”

Peter groaned.

“Of course!” he said. “Why, in Heaven’s name, didn’t I make it an eagle? One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really liked the letter?”

“He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his hands.”

Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten, he talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys’ club at home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his hobby.

“Scum of the earth, most of them,” he said, his plain face glowing. “Dirty little beggars off the street. At first they stole my tobacco; and one of them pawned a medical book or two! Then they got to playing the game right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish you could have seen them! Used to line ‘em up and make ‘em spell, and the two best spellers were allowed to fight it out with gloves—my own method, and it worked. Spell! They’d spell their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee, how I hated to give them up!”

This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met before. For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He had always seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of his elder brother attitude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly rather shy, a bit aloof. Peter felt the change and thought she was bored. He talked of other things.

A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the Pension Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the trunk, in ulster and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather frightened, was coming down with a traveling-bag. She put down the bag and scuttled up the staircase like a scared rabbit. The little doctor was grim. She eyed Peter and Harmony with an impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.

“I’ve been waiting for you two,” she flung at them. “I’ve had a terrific row upstairs and I’m going. That woman’s a devil!”

It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development, after everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She had clung, at first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of affection, to the sharp little doctor with her mannish affectations, her soft and womanly heart.

“Sit down, child.” Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. ” You are fagged out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to me? How much did it cost the three of us to live in this abode of virtue?”

It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.

“I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional, but it will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will be cheaper, I’m sure of that: We are all going out to the hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa, and Harmony shall keep house for us!”

CHAPTER IX

It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her trunk in the cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the conversational bomb that left empty three rooms in the Pension Schwarz.

Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the lodge of Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars—back, but with a difference. True, the gate still swung back and forward on rusty hinges, obedient to every whim of the December gales; but the casement windows in the salon no longer creaked or admitted drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll of rubber weather-casing. The grand piano, which had been Scatchy’s rented extravagance, had gone never to return, and in its corner stood a battered but still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a table with an oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove gleamed warm with fire. On the table by the lamp were the combined medical books of Peter and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray which also they used in common.

Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria Theresa. But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door of the stove open, and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had been washed, with Harmony playing softly, it took resolution on Peter’s part to put on his overcoat and face a lecture on the resection of a rib or a discussion of the function of the pituitary body.

The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not only greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly cheap. Coal, which had cost ninety Hellers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they bought in quantity and could afford to use lavishly. Oil for the lamp was a trifle. They dined on venison now and then, when the shop across boasted a deer from the mountains. They had other game occasionally, when Peter, carrying home a mysterious package, would make them guess what it might contain. Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits. She knew how to cook rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.

For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing to make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance of Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch him. Peter was firm.

It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.

“Don’t be too obstinate, Peter,” she admonished him. “The child needs occupation; she can’t practice all day. You and I can keep up the financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her heart’s content. That can be her contribution to the general fund.”

And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur from Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna almost to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make certain of her usefulness.

A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of the brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the Austrians.

The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least of all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women, and Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound or two in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was growing round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real change was in Harmony herself.

The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which such changes come—not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a breath. One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion, quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman, tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic and high spirits.

The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had been settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the Pension Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be recalled, along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every odor of stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had had a bad week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In vain the sentry had stopped outside the third window and smiled and nodded through it; in vain—when the street was deserted and there was none to notice—he went through a bit of the manual of arms on the pavement outside, ending by setting his gun down with a martial and ringing clang.

In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland as never was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all hornless, as he carefully emphasized.

And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and with the aid of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and set it in the barred window. The real sentry had been very much astonished; he had almost fallen over backward. On recovering he went entirely through the manual of arms, and was almost seen by an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all most exciting.

Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had taken him some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her first essay in jelly and Jimmy being frank with the candor of childhood. The jelly had been a great success.

It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very near his heart.

“The horns haven’t come, have they?” he asked wistfully.

“No, not yet.”

“Do you think he got my letter about them?”

“He answered it, didn’t he?”

Jimmy drew a long breath. “It’s very funny. He’s mostly so quick. If I had the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the bed. And I could pretend I was hunting.”

Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she saw hanging in front of the wildgame shop next to the delicatessen store a fresh deer, and this time it was a stag. Like the others it hung head down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the shop door as if mutely begging admission.

She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained, implored. Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her. The wildgame seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer entire, or he would mount head and antlers for his wife’s cousin in Galicia as a Christmas gift.

Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was profoundly depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home early and was building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile. Anna was not yet home.

Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.

“Can’t we have the firelight for a little while? You are always beautiful, but—you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony.”

“That is because you like me. We always think our friends are beautiful.”

“I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful.”

The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table, and Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few street sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from the world of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying humanity, lay the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed halls, its dark and twisting staircases.

Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had been growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was very comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease. Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship, and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does not thrive on hunger.

Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy life. Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken himself savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck. So he had kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And now!

He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he was much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.

The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features. Harmony, knife poised over the evening’s potatoes, looked at him.

“I think you are sad to-night, Peter.”

“Depressed a bit. That’s all.”

“It isn’t money again?”

It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought. This discovery had been very upsetting.

“Not more than usual. Don’t mind me. I’ll probably end in a roaring bad temper and smash something. My moody spells often break up that way!”

Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat rested a hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.

“I have hurt you in some way?”

“Of course not.”

“Could—could you talk about whatever it is? That helps sometimes.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“You haven’t quarreled with Anna?” Harmony asked, real concern in her voice.

“No. Good Lord, Harmony, don’t ask me what’s wrong! I don’t know myself.”

He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against the wall. Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table. The kitchen was entirely dark, save for the firelight, which gleamed on the bare floor and the red legs of the table. She was fumbling with a match and the candle when she realized that Peter was just behind her, very close.

“Dearest,” he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to him, was kissing her lips, her hair.

Harmony’s heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against him. The gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness, his starved senses rushed forth in tardy assertion.

After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her go. Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The storm that had torn him root and branch from his firm ground of self-restraint left her only shaken. He was still very close to her; she could hear him breathing. He did not attempt to speak. With every atom of strength that was left in him he was fighting a mad desire to take her in his arms again and keep her there.

That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.

She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she turned and faced him.

“That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter,” she said quietly.

“Why not?”

“There isn’t any question about it.”

He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her still obsessed him. “Why not? Why should I not take you in my arms? If there is a moment of happiness to be had in this grind of work and loneliness—”

“It has not made me happy.”

Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so effectual. Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion in her voice. He knew then that he had left her unstirred. He dropped his outstretched arms.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it.”

“I would rather not talk about it, please.”

The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had arrived and was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew a long breath, and, after his habit, shook himself.

“Very well, we’ll not talk of it. But, for Heaven’s sake, Harmony, don’t avoid me. I’m not a cad. I’ll let you alone.”

There was only time for a glance of understanding between them, of promise from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna Gates entered the kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and Peter filling up an already overfed stove.

That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the thrifty city fathers of the old town had shut off the street lights because two hours later the sun would rise and furnish light that cost the taxpayers nothing, the Portier’s wife awakened.

The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions when the Portier’s wife awakened in the night and heard the twin clocks of the Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps, while the delicatessen seller ambled home from the Schubert Society, singing beerily as he ambled, she was wont to hear from the bed beside hers the rhythmic respiration that told her how safe from Schubert Societies and such like evils was her lord. There was no sound at all.

The Portier’s wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over. Owing to the width of the table that stood between the beds and to a sweeping that day which had left the beds far apart she met nothing but empty air. Words had small effect on the Portier, who slept fathoms deep in unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to get up—the floor was cold and a wind blowing. Could she not hear it and the creaking of the deer across the street, as it swung on its hook?

The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the iron candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at the Portier’s pillow. No startled yell followed.

Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier’s wife forgot the cold floor and the wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.

Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it even stood open an inch or two.

Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door and waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned kept her warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an hour. The candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice to red-hot fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain swung in the wind.

At four o’clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert Society—What was that?

From the Portier’s bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!

She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now lighted, and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled with suspicion.

“Thou hast been out of thy bed!”

“But no!”

“An hour since the bed was empty.”

“Thou dreamest.”

“The chain is off the door.”

“Let it remain so and sleep. What have we to steal or the Americans above? Sleep and keep peace.”

He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The Portier’s wife crawled into her bed and warmed her aching feet under the crimson feather comfort. But her soul was shaken.

The Devil had been known to come at night and take innocent ones out to do his evil. The innocent ones knew it not, but it might be told by the soles of the feet, which were always soiled.

At dawn the Portier’s wife cautiously uncovered the soles of her sleeping lord’s feet, and fell back gasping. They were quite black, as of one who had tramped in garden mould.

Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night, opened the door from the salon of Maria Theresa into the hall and set out a pitcher for the milk.

On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the deer across the street. Tied to them was a bit of paper, and on it was written the one word, “Still!”

CHAPTER X

In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to trace the steps by which the inevitable advanced. Destiny marches, not by great leaps but with a thousand small and painful steps, and here and there it leaves its mark, a footprint on a naked soul. We trace a life by its scars, as a tree by its rings.

Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for Harmony, and this with every allowance for her real kindliness, her genuine affection for the girl. Life had destroyed her illusions, and it was of illusions that Harmony’s veil had been woven. To Anna Gates, worn with a thousand sleepless nights, a thousand thankless days, withered before her time with the struggling routine of medical practice, sapped with endless calls for sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual and became physiological.

Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries. The veil was rent.

To fit this existence of hers she had built herself a curious creed, a philosophy of individualism, from behind which she flung strange bombshells of theories, shafts of distorted moralities, personal liberties, irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for modern law and the prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her law and her prophet.

In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had wrought no mischief. Temptation had been lacking to exploit them, and even in the event of the opportunity it was doubtful whether she would have had the strength of her convictions. Men love theories, but seldom have the courage of them, and Anna Gates was largely masculine. Women, being literal, are apt to absorb dangerous doctrine and put it to the test. When it is false doctrine they discover it too late.

Harmony was now a woman.

Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony’s eyes widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased her more than to pit her individualism against the girl’s rigid and conventional morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable argument.

On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took place—hardly an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing. Anna had taken a heavy cold, and remained at home. Harmony had been practicing, and at the end she played a little winter song by some modern composer. It breathed all the purity of a white winter’s day; it was as chaste as ice and as cold; and yet throughout was the thought of green things hiding beneath the snow and the hope of spring.

Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was rather ashamed of her thought.

“It seems that way to me,” she finished apologetically. “It sounds rather silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes certain things.”

“And this gentleman who writes of winter?”

“I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any one.”

“Indeed!”

“When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it, exactly as in books—the difference between a love story and—and—”

“—a dictionary !”

“You always laugh,” Harmony complained

“That’s better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way things go in this world I want to weep always.”

“I don’t find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but there are good ones.”

“Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose.”

“There are plenty of good men.”

“What do you call a good man?”

Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:—

“Honorable men.”

Anna smiled. “My dear child,” she said, “you substitute the code of a gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a monogamist?”

Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.

“Then there are no ‘good’ people in the polygamous countries, I suppose! When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives. To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman—and a fifth over—for every man. Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples there is a derelict like myself, mateless.”

Anna’s amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony. Her resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless, brought forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl. In the atmosphere in which Harmony had been reared single women were always presumed to be thus by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those weaker sisters who had married. Anna, on the contrary, was frankly a derelict, frankly regretted her maiden condition and railed with bitterness against her enforced childlessness. The near approach of Christmas had for years found her morose and resentful. There are, here and there, such women, essentially mothers but not necessarily wives, their sole passion that of maternity.

Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in her resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever known, and offered her instead an incredible liberty in the name of the freedom of the individual. Harmony found all her foundations of living shaken, and though refusing to accept Anna’s theories, found her faith in her own weakened. She sat back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up out of her discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written high in its firmament.

When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at the girl’s stricken face.

“I’m a fool!” she said contritely. “If Peter had been here he’d have throttled me. I deserve it. I’m a theorist, pure and simple, and theorists are the anarchists of society. There’s only one comfort about us—we never live up to our convictions. Now forget all this rot I’ve been talking.”

Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two for Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano for Harmony from New York. The Big Soprano was very glad to be back and spent two pages over her chances for concert work.

“… I could have done as well had I stayed at home. If I had had the money they wanted, to go to Geneva and sing ‘Brunnhilde,’ it would have helped a lot. I could have said I’d sung in opera in Europe and at least have had a hearing at the Met. But I didn’t, and I’m back at the church again and glad to get my old salary. If it’s at all possible, stay until the master has presented you in a concert. He’s quite right, you haven’t a chance unless he does. And now I’ll quit grumbling.

“Scatchy met her Henry at the dock and looked quite lovely, flushed with excitement and having been up since dawn curling her hair. He was rather a disappointment—small and blond, with light blue eyes, and almost dapper. But oh, my dear, I wouldn’t care how pale a man’s eyes were if he looked at me the way Henry looked at her.

“They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to be alone together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could swallow for the lump in my throat, by myself. I was homesick enough in old Wien, but I am just as homesick now that I am here, for we are really homesick only for people, not places. And no one really cared whether I came back or not.”

Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day before, but with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the situation was unpleasant and decide to leave? What if a reckless impulse, recklessly carried out, were to break up an arrangement that had made a green oasis of happiness and content for all of them in the desert of their common despair?

If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to argue, to justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally. He almost groaned aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the wintry garden.

He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his word. “I am not a beast. I’ll let you alone,” he had said. She had had a bad night, as nights go. She had gone through the painful introspection which, in a thoroughly good girl, always follows such an outburst as Peter’s. Had she said or done anything to make him think—Surely she had not! Had she been wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.

While the Portier’s wife, waked, as may happen, by an unaccustomed silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron candlestick in hand, Harmony, having read the Litany through in the not particularly religious hope of getting to sleep, was dreaming placidly. It was Peter who tossed and turned almost all night. Truly there had been little sleep that night in the old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa.

Peter, still not quite at ease, that evening kept out of the kitchen while supper was preparing. Anna, radical theories forgotten and wearing a knitted shawl against drafts, was making a salad, and Harmony, all anxiety and flushed with heat, was broiling a steak.

Steak was an extravagance, to be cooked with clear hot coals and prayer.

“Peter,” she called, “you may set the table. And try to lay the cloth straight.”

Peter, exiled in the salon, came joyously. Obviously the wretched business of yesterday was forgiven. He came to the door, pipe in mouth.

“Suppose I refuse?” he questioned. “You—you haven’t been very friendly with me to-day, Harry.”

“I?”

“Don’t quarrel, you children,” cried Anna, beating eggs vigorously. “Harmony is always friendly, too friendly. The Portier loves her.”

“I’m sure I said good-evening to you.”

“You usually say, ‘Good-evening, Peter.’ ”

“And I did not?”

“You did not.”

“Then—Good-evening, Peter.”

“Thank you.”

His steady eyes met hers. In them there was a renewal of his yesterday’s promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him with forgiveness and restoration.

“Sometimes,” said Peter humbly, “when I am in very great favor, you say, ‘Good-evening, Peter, dear.’ ”

“Good-evening, Peter, dear,” said Harmony.

CHAPTER XI

The affairs of young Stewart and Marie Jedlicka were not moving smoothly. Having rented their apartment to the Boyers, and through Marie’s frugality and the extra month’s wages at Christmas, which was Marie’s annual perquisite, being temporarily in funds the sky seemed clear enough, and Walter Stewart started on his holiday with a comfortable sense of financial security.

Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie’s temporary exile in the apartment across the hall, was captivated by the comfort of the little suite and by its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie’s kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment. Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty years’ accumulation, that “Frank” might catch up with his profession.

She had explained it rather tremulously at home.

“Father wants to go,” she said. “You children are big enough now to be left. He’s always wanted to do it, but we couldn’t go while you were little.”

“But, mother!” expostulated the oldest girl. “When you are so afraid of the ocean! And a year!”

“What is to be will be,” she had replied. “If I’m going to be drowned I’ll be drowned, whether it’s in the sea or in a bathtub. And I’ll not let father go alone.”

Fatalism being their mother’s last argument and always final, the children gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so elaborate a wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to purchase anything abroad. She had gone through Paris looking straight ahead lest her eyes lead her into the temptation of the shops. In Vienna she wore her home-town outfit with determination, vaguely conscious that the women about her had more style, were different. She priced unsuitable garments wistfully, and went home to her trunks full of best materials that would never wear out. The children, knowing her, had bought the best.

To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment. It is hard to say by what psychology he found their respectability so satisfactory. It was as though his own status gained by it. He had much the same feeling about the order and decency with which Marie managed the apartment, as if irregularity were thus regularized.

Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben. She had worn an experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were drawn under her blue eyes, darkening them. She had looked very pretty, rather frightened. Stewart had sent her home and had sulked for an entire evening.

So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of disorder, so conventional its defiance of convention. Stewart breaking the law and trying to keep the letter!

On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn. There was much to do. The house must be left clean and shining. There must be no feminine gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it was not a purely masculine establishment. At the last moment, so late that it sent her heart into her mouth, she happened on the box of rouge hidden from Stewart’s watchful eyes. She gave it to the milk girl.

Finally she folded her meager wardrobe and placed it in the Herr Doktor’s American trunk: a marvel, that trunk, so firm, so heavy, bound with iron. And with her own clothing she packed Stewart’s, the dress-suit he had worn once to the Embassy, a hat that folded, strange American shoes, and books—always books. The Herr Doktor would study at Semmering. When all was in readiness and Stewart was taking a final survey, Marie ran downstairs and summoned a cab. It did not occur to her to ask him to do it. Marie’s small life was one of service, and besides there was an element in their relationship that no one but Marie suspected, and that she hid even from herself. She was very much in love with this indifferent American, this captious temporary god of her domestic altar. Such a contingency had never occurred to Stewart; but Peter, smoking gravely in the little apartment, had more than once caught a look in Marie’s eyes as she turned them on the other man, and had surmised it. It made him uncomfortable.

When the train was well under way, however, and he found no disturbing element among the three others in the compartment, Stewart relaxed. Semmering was a favorite resort with the American colony, but not until later in the winter. In December there were rains in the mountains, and lowlying clouds that invested some of the chalets in constant fog. It was not until the middle of January that the little mountain train became crowded with tourists, knickerbockered men with knapsacks, and jaunty feathers in their soft hats, boys carrying ski, women with Alpine cloaks and iron-pointed sticks.

Marie was childishly happy. It was the first real vacation of her life, and more than that she was going to Semmering, in the very shadow of the Raxalpe, the beloved mountain of the Viennese.

Marie had seen the Rax all her life, as it towered thirty miles or so away above the plain. On peaceful Sundays, having climbed the cog railroad, she had seen its white head turn rosy in the setting sun, and once when a German tourist from Munich had handed her his fieldglass she had even made out some of the crosses that showed where travelers had met their deaths. Now she would be very close. If the weather were good, she might even say a prayer in the chapel on its crest for the souls of those who had died. It was of a marvel, truly; so far may one go when one has money and leisure.

The small single-trucked railway carriages bumped and rattled up the mountain sides, always rising, always winding. There were moments when the track held to the cliffs only by gigantic fingers of steel, while far below were peaceful valleys and pink-and-blue houses and churches with gilded spires. There were vistas of snow-peak and avalanche shed, and always there were tunnels. Marie, so wise in some things, was a child in others; she slid close to Stewart in the darkness and touched him for comfort.

“It is so dark,” she apologized, “and it frightens me, the mountain heart. In your America, have you so great mountains?”

Stewart patted her hand, a patronizing touch that sent her blood racing.

“Much larger,” he said magnificently. “I haven’t seen a hill in Europe I’d exchange for the Rockies. And when we cross the mountains there we use railway coaches. These toy railroads are a joke. At home we’d use ‘em as street-cars.”

“Really! I should like to see America.”

“So should I.”

The conversation was taking a dangerous trend. Mention of America was apt to put the Herr Doktor in a bad humor or to depress him, which was even worse. Marie, her hand still on his arm and not repulsed, became silent.

At a small way station the three Germans in the compartment left the train. Stewart, lowering a window, bought from a boy on the platform beer and sausages and a bag of pretzels. As the train resumed its clanking progress they ate luncheon, drinking the beer from the bottles and slicing the sausage with a penknife. It was a joyous trip, a red-letter day in the girl’s rather sordid if not uneventful life. The Herr Doktor was pleased with her. He liked her hat, and when she flushed with pleasure demanded proof that she was not rouged. Proof was forthcoming. She rubbed her cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief and produced in triumph its unreddened purity.

“Thou suspicious one!” she pouted. “I must take off the skin to assure thee! When the Herr Doktor says no rouge, I use none.”

“You’re a good child.” He stooped over and kissed one scarlet cheek and then being very comfortable and the beer having made him drowsy, he put his head in her lap and slept.

When he awakened they were still higher. The snow-peak towered above and the valleys were dizzying! Semmering was getting near. They were frequently in darkness; and between the tunnels were long lines of granite avalanche sheds. The little passage of the car was full of tourists looking down.

“We are very close, I am sure,” an American girl was saying just outside the doorway. “See, isn’t that the Kurhaus? There, it is lost again.”

The tourists in the passage were Americans and the girl who had spoken was young and attractive. Stewart noticed them for the first time and moved to a more decorous distance from Marie.

Marie Jedlicka took her cue and lapsed into silence, but her thoughts were busy. Perhaps this girl was going to Semmering also and the Herr Doktor would meet her. But that was foolish! There were other resorts besides Semmering, and in the little villa to which they went there would be no Americans. It was childish to worry about a girl whose back and profile only she had seen. Also profiles were deceptive; there was the matter of the ears. Marie’s ears were small and set close to her head. If the American Fraulein’s ears stuck out or her face were only short and wide! But no. The American Fraulein turned and glanced once swiftly into the compartment. She was quite lovely.

Stewart thought so, too. He got up with a great show of stretching and yawning and lounged into the passage. He did not speak to the girl; Marie noted that with some comfort. But shortly after she saw him conversing easily with a male member of the party. Her heart sank again. Life was moving very fast for Marie Jedlicka that afternoon on the train.

Stewart was duly presented to the party of Americans and offered his own cards, bowing from the waist and clicking his heels together, a German custom he had picked up. The girl was impressed; Marie saw that. When they drew into the station at Semmering Stewart helped the American party off first and then came back for Marie. Less keen eyes than the little Austrian’s would have seen his nervous anxiety to escape attention, once they were out of the train and moving toward the gate of the station. He stopped to light a cigarette, he put down the hand-luggage and picked it up again, as though it weighed heavily, whereas it was both small and light. He loitered through the gate and paused to exchange a word with the gateman.

The result was, of course, that the Americans were in a sleigh and well up the mountainside before Stewart and Marie were seated side by side in a straw-lined sledge, their luggage about them, a robe over their knees, and a noisy driver high above them on the driving-seat. Stewart spoke to her then, the first time for half an hour.

Marie found some comfort. The villas at Semmering were scattered wide over the mountain breast, set in dense clumps of evergreens, hidden from the roads and from each other by trees and shrubbery separated by valleys. One might live in one part of Semmering for a month and never suspect the existence of other parts, or wander over steep roads and paths for days and never pass twice over the same one. The Herr Doktor might not see the American girl again—and if he did! Did he not see American girls wherever he went?

The sleigh climbed on. It seemed they would never stop climbing. Below in the valley twilight already reigned, a twilight of blue shadows, of cows with bells wandering home over frosty fields, of houses with dark faces that opened an eye of lamplight as one looked.

Across the valley and far above—Marie pointed without words. Her small heart was very full. Greater than she had ever dreamed it, steeper, more beautiful, more deadly, and crowned with its sunset hue of rose was the Rax. Even Stewart lost his look of irritation as he gazed with her. He reached over and covered both her hands with his large one under the robe.

The sleigh climbed steadily. Marie Jedlicka, in a sort of ecstasy, leaned back and watched the mountain; its crown faded from rose to gold, from gold to purple with a thread of black. There was a shadow on the side that looked like a cross. Marie stopped the sleigh at a wayside shrine, and getting out knelt to say a prayer for the travelers who had died on the Rax. They had taken a room at a small villa where board was cheap, and where the guests were usually Germans of the thriftier sort from Bavaria. Both the season and the modest character of the establishment promised them quiet and seclusion.

To Marie the house seemed the epitome of elegance, even luxury. It clung to a steep hillside. Their room, on the third floor, looked out from the back of the building over the valley, which fell away almost sheer from beneath their windows. A tiny balcony outside, with access to it by a door from the bedroom, looked far down on the tops of tall pines. It made Marie dizzy.

She was cheerful again and busy. The American trunk was to be unpacked and the Herr Doktor’s things put away, his shoes in rows, as he liked them, and his shaving materials laid out on the washstand. Then there was a new dress to put on, that she might do him credit at supper.

Stewart’s bad humor had returned. He complained of the room and the draft under the balcony door; the light was wrong for shaving. But the truth came out at last and found Marie not unprepared.

“The fact is,” he said, “I’m not going to eat with you to-night, dear. I’m going to the hotel.”

“With the Americans?”

“Yes. I know a chap who went to college with the brother—with the young man you saw.”

Marie glanced down at her gala toilet. Then she began slowly to take off the dress, reaching behind her for a hook he had just fastened and fighting back tears as she struggled with it.

“Now, remember, Marie, I will have no sulking.”

“I am not sulking.”

“Why should you change your clothes?”

“Because the dress was for you. If you are not here I do not wish to wear it.”

Stewart went out in a bad humor, which left him before he had walked for five minutes in the clear mountain air. At the hotel he found the party waiting for him, the women in evening gowns. The girl, whose name was Anita, was bewitching in pale green.

That was a memorable night for Walter Stewart, with his own kind once more—a perfect dinner, brisk and clever conversation, enlivened by a bit of sweet champagne, an hour or two on the terrace afterward with the women in furs, and stars making a jeweled crown for the Rax.

He entirely forgot Marie until he returned to the villa and opening the door of the room found her missing.

She had not gone far. At the sound of his steps she moved on the balcony and came in slowly. She was pale and pinched with cold, but she was wise with the wisdom of her kind. She smiled.

“Didst thou have a fine evening?”

“Wonderful!”

“I am sorry if I was unpleasant. I was tired, now I am rested.”

“Good, little Marie!”

CHAPTER XII

The card in the American Doctors’ Club brought a response finally. It was just in time. Harmony’s funds were low, and the Frau Professor Bergmeister had gone to St. Moritz for the winter. She regretted the English lessons, but there were always English at St. Moritz and it cost nothing to talk with them. Before she left she made Harmony a present. “For Christmas,” she explained. It was a glass pin-tray, decorated beneath with labels from the Herr Professor’s cigars and in the center a picture of the Emperor.

The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against an east wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened the old garden gate by the simple expedient of leaning against it. It flew back violently, almost overthrowing a stout woman in process of egress down the walk. The stout woman was Mrs. Boyer, clad as usual in the best broadcloth and wearing her old sable cape, made over according to her oldest daughter’s ideas into a staid stole and muff. The muff lay on the path now and Mrs. Boyer was gasping for breath.

“I’m so sorry!” Harmony exclaimed. “It was stupid of me; but the wind—Is this your muff?”

Mrs. Boyer took the muff coldly. From its depths she proceeded to extract a handkerchief and with the handkerchief she brushed down the broadcloth. Harmony stood apologetically by. It is explanatory of Mrs. Boyer’s face, attitude, and costume that the girl addressed her in English.

“I backed in,” she explained. “So few people come, and no Americans.”

Mrs. Boyer, having finished her brushing and responded to this humble apology in her own tongue, condescended to look at Harmony.

“It really is no matter,” she said, still coolly but with indications of thawing. “I am only glad it did not strike my nose. I dare say it would have, but I was looking up to see if it were going to snow.” Here she saw the violin case and became almost affable.

“There was a card in the Doctors’ Club, and I called—” She hesitated.

“I am Miss Wells. The card is mine.”

“One of the women here has a small boy who wishes to take violin lessons and I offered to come. The mother is very busy.”

“I see. Will you come in? I can make you a cup of tea and we can talk about it.”

Mrs. Boyer was very willing, although she had doubts about the tea. She had had no good tea since she had left England, and was inclined to suspect all of it.

They went in together, Harmony chatting gayly as she ran ahead, explaining this bit of the old staircase, that walled-up door, here an ancient bit of furniture not considered worthy of salvage, there a closed and locked room, home of ghosts and legends. To Harmony this elderly woman, climbing slowly behind her, was a bit of home. There had been many such in her life; women no longer young, friends of her mother’s who were friends of hers; women to whom she had been wont to pay the courtesy of a potted hyacinth at Easter or a wreath at Christmas or a bit of custard during an illness. She had missed them all cruelly, as she had missed many things—her mother, her church, her small gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau Professor Bergmeister might allay her longing for these comfortable, middle-aged, placid-eyed friends of hers. But the Frau Professor Bergmeister had proved to be a frivolous and garrulous old woman, who substituted ease for comfort, and who burned a candle on the name-day of her first husband while her second was safely out of the house.

So it was with something of excitement that Harmony led the way up the stairs and into the salon of Maria Theresa.

Peter was there. He was sitting with his back to the door, busily engaged in polishing the horns of the deer. Whatever scruples Harmony had had about the horns, Peter had none whatever, save to get them safely out of the place and to the hospital. So Peter was polishing the horns. Harmony had not expected to find him home, and paused, rather startled.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were home.”

Peter spoke without turning.

“Try to bear up under it,” he said. “I’m home and hungry, sweetheart!”

“Peter, please!”

Peter turned at that and rose instantly. It was rather dark in the salon and he did not immediately recognize Mrs. Boyer. But that keen-eyed lady had known him before he turned, had taken in the domesticity of the scene and Peter’s part in it, and had drawn the swift conclusion of the pure of heart.

“I’ll come again,” she said hurriedly. “I—I must really get home. Dr. Boyer will be there, and wondering—”

“Mrs. Boyer!” Peter knew her.

“Oh, Dr. Byrne, isn’t it? How unexpected to find you here!”

“I live here.”

“So I surmised.”

“Three of us,” said Peter. “You know Anna Gates, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid not. Really I—”

Peter was determined to explain. His very eagerness was almost damning.

“She and Miss Wells are keeping house here and have kindly taken me in as a boarder. Please sit down.”

Harmony found nothing strange in the situation and was frankly puzzled at Peter. The fact that there was anything unusual in two single women and one unmarried man, unrelated and comparative strangers, setting up housekeeping together had never occurred to her. Many a single woman whom she knew at home took a gentleman into the house as a roomer, and thereafter referred to him as “he” and spent hours airing the curtains of smoke and even, as “he” became a member of the family, in sewing on his buttons. There was nothing indecorous about such an arrangement; merely a concession to economic pressure.

She made tea, taking off her jacket and gloves to do it, but bustling about cheerfully, with her hat rather awry and her cheeks flushed with excitement and hope. Just now, when the Frau Professor had gone, the prospect of a music pupil meant everything. An American child, too! Fond as Harmony was of children, the sedate and dignified youngsters who walked the parks daily with a governess, or sat with folded hands and fixed eyes through hours of heavy music at the opera, rather daunted her. They were never alone, those Austrian children—always under surveillance, always restrained, always prepared to kiss the hand of whatever relative might be near and to take themselves of to anywhere so it were somewhere else.

“I am so glad you are going to talk to me about an American child,” said Harmony, bringing in the tea.

But Mrs. Boyer was not so sure she was going to talk about the American child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked most irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult situation with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea was good; that was one thing.

She sat back with her muff on her knee, having refused the concession of putting it on a chair as savoring too much of acceptance if not approval, and sipped her tea out of a spoon as becomes a tea-lover. Peter, who loathed tea, lounged about the room, clearly in the way, but fearful to leave Harmony alone with her. She was quite likely, at the first opportunity, to read her a lesson on the conventions, if nothing worse; to upset the delicate balance of the little household he was guarding. So he stayed, praying for Anna to come and bear out his story, while Harmony toyed with her spoon and waited for some mention of the lessons. None came. Mrs. Boyer, having finished her tea, rose and put down her cup.

“That was very refreshing,” she said. “Where shall I find the street-car? I walked out, but it is late.”

“I’ll take you to the car.” Peter picked up his old hat.

“Thank you. I am always lost in this wretched town. I give the conductors double tips to put me down where I want to go; but how can they when it is the wrong car?” She bowed to Harmony without shaking hands. “Thank you for the tea. It was really good. Where do you get it?”

“There is a tea-shop a door or two from the Grand Hotel.”

“I must remember that. Thank you again. Good-bye.”

Not a word about the lessons or the American child!

“You said something about my card in the Doctors’ Club—”

Something wistful in the girl’s eyes caught and held Mrs. Boyer.

After all she was the mother of daughters. She held out her hand and her voice was not so hard.

“That will have to wait until another time. I have made a social visit and we’ll not spoil it with business.”

“But—”

“I really think the boy’s mother must attend to that herself. But I shall tell her where to find you, and”—here she glanced at Peter—“all about it.”

“Thank you,” said Harmony gratefully.

Peter had no finesse. He escorted Mrs. Boyer across the yard and through the gate with hardly a word. With the gate closed behind them he turned and faced her:—

“You are going away with a wrong impression, Mrs. Boyer.”

Mrs. Boyer had been thinking hard as she crossed the yard. The result was a resolution to give Peter a piece of her mind. She drew her ample proportions into a dignity that was almost majesty.

“Yes?”

“I—I can understand why you think as you do. It is quite without foundation.”

“I am glad of that.” There was no conviction in her voice.

“Of course,” went on Peter, humbling himself for Harmony’s sake, “I suppose it has been rather unconventional, but Dr. Gates is not a young woman by any means, and she takes very good care of Miss Wells. There were reasons why this seemed the best thing to do. Miss Wells was alone and—”

“There is a Dr. Gates?”

“Of course. If you will come back and wait she’ll be along very soon.”

Mrs. Boyer was convinced and defrauded in one breath; convinced that there might be a Dr. Gates, but equally convinced that the situation was anomalous and certainly suspicious; defrauded in that she had lost the anticipated pleasure of giving Peter a piece of her mind. She walked along beside him without speaking until they reached the street-car line. Then she turned.

“You called her—you spoke to her very affectionately, young man,” she accused him.

Peter smiled. The car was close. Some imp of recklessness, some perversion of humor seized him.

“My dear Mrs. Boyer,” he said, “that was in jest purely. Besides, I did not know that you were there!”

Mrs. Boyer was a literal person without humor. It was outraged American womanhood incarnate that got into the street-car and settled its broadcloth of the best quality indignantly on the cane seat. It was outraged American womanhood that flung open the door of Marie Jedlicka’s flat, and stalking into Marie Jedlicka’s sitting room confronted her husband as he read a month-old newspaper from home.

“Did you ever hear of a woman doctor named Gates?” she demanded.

Boyer was not unaccustomed to such verbal attacks. He had learned to meet domestic broadsides with a shield of impenetrable good humor, or at the most with a return fire of mild sarcasm.

“I never hear of a woman doctor if it can be avoided.”

“Dr. Gates—Anna Gates?”

“There are a number here. I meet them in the hospital, but I don’t know their names.”

“Where does Peter Byrne live?”

“In a pension, I believe, my dear. Are we going to have anything to eat or do we sup of Peter Byrne?”

Mrs. Boyer made no immediate reply. She repaired to the bedroom of Marie Jedlicka, and placed her hat, coat and furs on one of the beds with the crocheted coverlets. It is a curious thing about rooms. There was no change in the bedroom apparent to the eye, save that for Marie’s tiny slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer’s substantial house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that soothed Mrs. Boyer’s ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not people? That when grandfather’s wraith is seen in his old armchair it is the chair that produces it, while grandfather himself serenely haunts the shades of some vast wilderness of departed spirits?

Not that Mrs. Boyer troubled herself about such things. She was exceedingly orthodox, even in the matter of a hereafter, where the most orthodox are apt to stretch a point, finding no attraction whatever in the thing they are asked to believe. Mrs. Boyer, who would have regarded it as heterodox to substitute any other instrument for the harp of her expectation, tied on her gingham apron before Marie Jedlicka’s mirror, and thought of Harmony and of the girls at home.

She told her husband over the supper-table and found him less shocked than she had expected.

“It’s not your affair or mine,” he said. “It’s Byrne’s business.”

“Think of the girl!”

“Even if you are right it’s rather late, isn’t it?”

“You could tell him what you think of him.”

Dr. Boyer sighed over a cup of very excellent coffee. Much living with a representative male had never taught his wife the reserves among members of the sex masculine.

“I might, but I don’t intend to,” he said. “And if you listen to me you’ll keep the thing to yourself.”

“I’ll take precious good care that the girl gets no pupils,” snapped Mrs. Boyer. And she did with great thoroughness.

We trace a life by its scars. Destiny, marching on by a thousand painful steps, had left its usual mark, a footprint on a naked soul. The soul was Harmony’s; the foot—was it not encased at that moment in Mrs. Boyer’s comfortable house shoes?

Anna was very late that night. Peter, having put Mrs. Boyer on her car, went back quickly. He had come out without his overcoat, and with the sunset a bitter wind had risen, but he was too indignant to be cold. He ran up the staircase, hearing on all sides the creaking and banging with which the old house resented a gale, and burst into the salon of Maria Theresa.

Harmony was sitting sidewise in a chair by the tea-table with her face hidden against its worn red velvet. She did not look up when he entered. Peter went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She quivered under it and he took it away.

“Crying?”

“A little,” very smothered. “Just dis-disappointment. Don’t mind me, Peter.”

“You mean about the pupil?”

Harmony sat up and looked at him. She still wore her hat, now more than ever askew, and some of the dye from the velvet had stained her cheek. She looked rather hectic, very lovely.

“Why did she change so when she saw you?”

Peter hesitated. Afterward he thought of a dozen things he might have said, safe things. Not one came to him.

“She—she is an evil-thinking old woman, Harry,” he said gravely.

“She did not approve of the way we are living here, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“But Anna?”

“She did not believe there was an Anna. Not that it matters,” he added hastily. “I’ll make Anna go to her and explain. It’s her infernal jumping to a conclusion that makes me crazy.”

“She will talk, Peter. I am frightened.”

“I’ll take Anna to-night and we’ll go to Boyer’s. I’ll make that woman get down on her knees to you. I’ll—”

“You’ll make bad very much worse,” said Harmony dejectedly. “When a thing has to be explained it does no good to explain it.”

The salon was growing dark. Peter was very close to her again. As in the dusky kitchen only a few days before, he felt the compelling influence of her nearness. He wanted, as he had never wanted anything in his life before, to take her in his arms, to hold her close and bid defiance to evil tongues. He was afraid of himself. To gain a moment he put a chair between them and stood, strong hands gripping its back, looking down at her.

“There is one thing we could do.”

“What, Peter?”

“We could marry. If you cared for me even a little it—it might not be so bad for you.”

“But I am not in love with you. I care for you, of course, but—not that way, Peter. And I do not wish to marry.”

“Not even if I wish it very much?”

“No.”

“If you are thinking of my future—”

“I’m thinking for both of us. And although just now you think you care a little for me, you do not care enough, Peter. You are lonely and I am the only person you see much, so you think you want to marry me. You don’t really. You want to help me.”

Few motives are unmixed. Poor Peter, thus accused, could not deny his altruism.

And in the face of his poverty and the little he could offer, compared with what she must lose, he did not urge what was the compelling motive after all, his need of her.

“It would be a rotten match for you,” he agreed. “I only thought, perhaps—You are right, of course; you ought not to marry.”

“And what about you?”

“I ought not, of course.”

Harmony rose, smiling a little.

“Then that’s settled. And for goodness’ sake, Peter, stop proposing to me every time things go wrong.” Her voice changed, grew grave and older, much older than Peter’s. “We must not marry, either of us, Peter. Anna is right. There might be an excuse if we were very much in love: but we are not. And loneliness is not a reason.”

“I am very lonely,” said Peter wistfully.

CHAPTER XIII

Peter took the polished horns to the hospital the next morning and approached Jimmy with his hands behind him and an atmosphere of mystery that enshrouded him like a cloak. Jimmy, having had a good night and having taken the morning’s medicine without argument, had been allowed up in a roller chair. It struck Peter with a pang that the boy looked more frail day by day, more transparent.

“I have brought you,” said Peter gravely, “the cod-liver oil.”

“I’ve had it!”

“Then guess.”

“Dad’s letter?”

“You’ve just had one. Don’t be a piggy.”

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Vegetable,” said Peter shamelessly.

“Soft or hard!”

“Soft.”

This was plainly a disappointment. A pair of horns might be vegetable; they could hardly be soft.

“A kitten?”

“A kitten is not vegetable, James.”

“I know. A bowl of gelatin from Harry!” For by this time Harmony was his very good friend, admitted to the Jimmy club, which consisted of Nurse Elisabet, the Dozent with the red beard, Anna and Peter, and of course the sentry, who did not know that he belonged.

“Gelatin, to be sure,” replied Peter, and produced the horns.

It was a joyous moment in the long low ward, with its triple row of beds, its barred windows, its clean, uneven old floor. As if to add a touch of completeness the sentry outside, peering in, saw the wheeled chair with its occupant, and celebrated this advance along the road to recovery by placing on the window-ledge a wooden replica of himself, bayonet and all, carved from a bit of cigar box.

“Everybody is very nice to me,” said Jimmy contentedly. “When my father comes back I shall tell him. He is very fond of people who are kind to me. There was a woman on the ship—What is bulging your pocket, Peter?”

“My handkerchief.”

“That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief.”

Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and stood up before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward watched joyously, while from pocket after pocket of Peter’s old gray suit came Jimmy’s salvage—two nuts, a packet of figs, a postcard that represented a stout colonel of hussars on his back on a frozen lake, with a private soldier waiting to go through the various salutations due his rank before assisting him. A gala day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the little mountain town with only a name on the cross at its head, and if one did not notice that the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands soon tired of playing and lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet, who was much inured to death and lived her days with tragedy, caught him to her almost fiercely as she lifted him back from the chair into the smooth white bed.

He fell asleep with Peter’s arm under his head and the horns of the deer beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden sentry, keeping guard. As Peter drew his arm away he became aware of the Nurse Elisabet beckoning to him from a door at the end of the ward Peter left the sentinel on guard and tiptoed down the room. Just outside, round a corner, was the Dozent’s laboratory, and beyond the tiny closet where he slept, where on a stand was the photograph of the lady he would marry when he had become a professor and required no one’s consent.

The Dozent was waiting for Peter. In the amiable conspiracy which kept the boy happy he was arch-plotter. His familiarity with Austrian intrigue had made him invaluable. He it was who had originated the idea of making Jimmy responsible for the order of the ward, so that a burly Trager quarreling over his daily tobacco with the nurse in charge, or brawling over his soup with another patient, was likely to be hailed in a thin soprano, and to stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in mixed English and German, restored the decorum of the ward. They were a quarrelsome lot, the convalescents. Jimmy was so busy some days settling disputes and awarding decisions that he slept almost all night. This was as it should be.

The Dozent waited for Peter. His red beard twitched and his white coat, stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous. He held out a letter.

“This has come for the child,” he said in quite good English. He was obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics Americans who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the money with which some day he would marry. He liked the English language; he liked Americans because they learned quickly. He held out an envelope with a black border and Peter took it.

“From Paris!” he said. “Who in the world—I suppose I’d better open it.”

“So I thought. It appears a letter of—how you say it? Ah, yes, condolence.”

Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave it open to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while the Dozent read it, silence except for his canary, which was chipping at a lump of sugar. Peter’s face was very sober.

“So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?”

“Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a baby—went on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her, which is a good thing. She seems to have been a bad lot.”

“She comes to take him away. That is impossible.”

“Of course it is impossible,” said Peter savagely. “She’s not going to see the child if I can help it. She left because—she’s the boy’s mother, but that’s the best you can say of her. This letter—Well, you’ve read it.”

“She is as a stranger to him?”

“Absolutely. She will come in mourning—look at that black border—and tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the type.”

The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent twitched, as does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the gushing letter in his hand and thought fiercely.

“She is on her way here,” said the Dozent. “That is bad. Paris to Wien is two days and a night. She may hourly arrive.”

“We might send him away—to another hospital.”

The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.

“Had I a home—” he said, and glanced through the door to the portrait on the stand. “It would be possible to hide the boy, at least for a time. In the interval the mother might be watched, and if she proved a fit person the boy could be given to her. It is, of course, an affair of police.”

This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail. He read the letter again, and tried to read into the lines Jimmy’s mother, and failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy slept. A burly convalescent, with a saber cut from temple to ear and the general appearance of an assassin, had stopped beside the bed and was drawing up the blanket round the small shoulders.

“I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day,” said the Dozent. “That gives us a few hours. She will go to the police, and to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time—”

“In the mean time,” Peter replied, “I’ll try to think of something. If I thought she could be warned and would leave him here—”

“She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with him through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to be there for carnival, and the boy will die.”

Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read it again in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from it. It spoke of the dead father coldly, and the father had been the boy’s idol. No good woman could have been so heartless. It offered the boy a seat in one of the least reputable of the Paris theaters to hear his mother sing. And in the envelope, overlooked before, Peter found a cutting from a French newspaper, a picture of the music-hall type that made him groan. It was indorsed “Mamma.”

Harmony had had a busy morning. First she had put her house in order, working deftly, her pretty hair pinned up in a towel—all in order but Peter’s room. That was to have a special cleaning later. Next, still with her hair tied up, she had spent two hours with her violin, standing very close to the stove to save fuel and keep her fingers warm. She played well that morning: even her own critical ears were satisfied, and the Portier, repairing a window lock in an empty room below, was entranced. He sat on the window sill in the biting cold and listened. Many music students had lived in the apartment with the great salon; there had been much music of one sort and another, but none like this.

“She tears my heart from my bosom,” muttered the Portier, sighing, and almost swallowed a screw that he held in his teeth.

After the practicing Harmony cleaned Peter’s room. She felt very tender toward Peter that day. The hurt left by Mrs. Boyer’s visit had died away, but there remained a clear vision of Peter standing behind the chair and offering himself humbly in marriage, so that a bad situation might be made better. And as with a man tenderness expresses itself in the giving of gifts, so with a woman it means giving of service. Harmony cleaned Peter’s room.

It was really rather tidy. Peter’s few belongings did not spread to any extent and years of bachelorhood had taught him the rudiments of order. Harmony took the covers from washstand and dressing table and washed and ironed them. She cleaned Peter’s worn brushes and brought a pincushion of her own for his one extra scarfpin. Finally she brought her own steamer rug and folded it across the foot of the bed. There was no stove in the room; it had been Harmony’s room once, and she knew to the full how cold it could be.

Having made all comfortable for the outer man she prepared for the inner. She was in the kitchen, still with her hair tied up, when Anna came home.

Anna was preoccupied. Instead of her cheery greeting she came somberly back to the kitchen, a letter in her hand. History was making fast that day.

“Hello, Harry,” she said. “I’m going to take a bite and hurry off. Don’t bother, I’ll attend to myself.” She stuffed the letter in her belt and got a plate from a shelf. “How pretty you look with your head tied up! If stupid Peter saw you now he would fall in love with you.”

“Then I shall take it off. Peter must be saved!”

Anna sat down at the tiny table and drank her tea. She felt rather better after the tea. Harmony, having taken the towel off, was busy over the brick stove. There was nothing said for a moment. Then:—

“I am out of patience with Peter,” said Anna.

“Why?”

“Because he hasn’t fallen in love with you. Where are his eyes?”

“Please, Anna!”

“It’s better as it is, no doubt, for both of you. But it’s superhuman of Peter. I wonder—”

“Yes?”

“I think I’ll not tell you what I wonder.”

And Harmony, rather afraid of Anna’s frank speech, did not insist.

As she drank her tea and made a pretense at eating, Anna’s thoughts wandered from Peter to Harmony to the letter in her belt and back again to Peter and Harmony. For some time she had been suspicious of Peter. From her dozen years of advantage in age and experience she looked down on Peter’s thirty years of youth, and thought she knew something that Peter himself did not suspect. Peter being unintrospective, Anna did his heart-searching for him. She believed he was madly in love with Harmony and did not himself suspect it. As she watched the girl over her teacup, revealing herself in a thousand unposed gestures of youth and grace, a thousand lovelinesses, something of the responsibility she and Peter had assumed came over her. She sighed and felt for her letter.

“I’ve had rather bad news,” she said at last.

“From home?”

“Yes. My father—did you know I have a father?”

“You hadn’t spoken of him.”

“I never do. As a father he hasn’t amounted to much. But he’s very ill, and—I ‘ve a conscience.”

Harmony turned a startled face to her.