."

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 o