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.
“You are not going back to America?”
“Oh, no, not now, anyhow. If I become hag ridden with remorse and do go I’ll find some one to take my place. Don’t worry.”
The lunch was a silent meal. Anna was hurrying off as Peter came in, and there was no time to discuss Peter’s new complication with her. Harmony and Peter ate together, Harmony rather silent. Anna’s unfortunate comment about Peter had made her constrained. After the meal Peter, pipe in mouth, carried the dishes to the kitchen, and there it was that he gave her the letter. What Peter’s slower mind had been a perceptible time in grasping Harmony comprehended at onceAand not only the situation, but its solution.
“Don’t let her have him!” she said, putting down the letter. “Bring him here. Oh, Peter, how good we must be to him!”
And that after all was how the thing was settled. So simple, so obvious was it that these three expatriates, these waifs and estrays, banded together against a common poverty, a common loneliness, should share without question whatever was theirs to divide. Peter and Anna gave cheerfully of their substance, Harmony of her labor, that a small boy should be saved a tragic knowledge until he was well enough to bear it, or until, if God so willed, he might learn it himself without pain.
The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly blind. Thus it happened that, although the night was clear when the twin dials of the Votivkirche showed nine o’clock, he did not notice a cab that halted across the
