shaking hands, and prepared to leave Harmony to her fate.
“Give me your mother’s address,” she demanded.
“Certainly not.”
“You absolutely refuse to save yourself?”
“From what? From Peter? There are many worse people than Peter to save myself from, Mrs. Boyer— uncharitable people, and—and cruel people.”
Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.
“Meaning me!” she retorted. “My dear child, people are always cruel who try to save us from ourselves.”
Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna’s specious arguments must pop into her head at that instant and demand expression.
“People are living their own lives these days, Mrs. Boyer; old standards have gone. It is what one’s conscience condemns that is wrong, isn’t it? Not merely breaking laws that were made to fit the average, not the exception.”
Anna! Anna!
Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.
“You are impossible!” she snapped. “After all, I believe it is Peter who needs protection! I shall speak to him.”
She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting volley.
“And just a word of advice: Perhaps the old standards have gone. But if you really expect to find a respectable woman to chaperon YOU, keep your views to yourself.”
Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy’s room and sank on her knees beside the bed. One small hand lay on the coverlet; she dared not touch it for fear of waking him—but she laid her cheek close to it for comfort. When Peter came in, much later, he found the boy wide awake and Harmony asleep, a crumpled heap beside the bed.
“I think she’s been crying,” Jimmy whispered. “She’s been sobbing in her sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may be more mice.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors’ Club. It was typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should be Dr. Jennings. Young McLean was in the reading room, eating his heart out with jealousy of Peter, vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that night and fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently if he made the attempt. He had found a picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a magazine, and was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and really in love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and Harmony were not unlike. The double doors between the reading room and the reception room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in a rosy future in which he and Harmony sat together for indefinite periods, with no Peter to scowl over his books at them, a future in which life was one long piano-violin duo, with the candles in the chandelier going out one by one, leaving them at last alone in scented darkness together—McLean heard nothing until the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.
After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was contemplating taking Anna’s place at the lodge, and he comprehended after a moment that Anna was already gone. Even then the significance of the situation was a little time in dawning on him. When it did, however, he rose with a stifled oath.
Mrs. Boyer was speaking.
“It is exactly as I tell you,” she was saying. “If Peter Byrne is trying to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally I have been there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is registered here at the club as living in the Pension Schwarz. Whatever the facts may be, one thing remains, she is not there now.”
McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage. He found a “comfortable” at the curb. The driver was asleep inside the carriage. McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and shouted an address to him. The cab bumped along over the rough streets to an accompaniment of protests from its frantic passenger.
The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter’s silence that afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and significant. He had thought once or twice that Peter was in love with Harmony; he knew it now in the clearer vision of the moment. He recalled things that maddened him: the dozen intimacies of the little menage, the caress in Peter’s voice when he spoke to the girl, Peter’s steady eyes in the semi-gloom of the salon while Harmony played.
At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean cursed, bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had been gone for half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he could only see the girl first, talk to her, tell her what she would be doing by remaining—
He was there at last, flinging across the courtyard like a madman. Peter was already there; his footprints were fresh in the slush of the path. The house door was closed but not locked. McLean ran up the stairs. It was barely twilight outside, but the staircase well was dark. At the upper landing he was compelled to fumble for the bell.
Peter admitted him. The corridor was unlighted, but from the salon came a glow of lamplight. McLean, out of breath and furious, faced Peter.
“I want to see Harmony,” he said without preface.
Peter eyed him. He knew what had happened, had expected it when the bell rang, had anticipated it when Harmony told him of Mrs. Boyer’s visit. In the second between the peal of the bell and his opening the door he had decided what to do.
“Come in.”
McLean stepped inside. He was smaller than Peter, not so much shorter as slenderer. Even Peter winced before the look in his eyes.
“Where is she?”
