ar Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar Schlaf'
in himmlischer Ruh', Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh'," they sang.

There was real festivity at the old lodge of Maria Theresa that night.

Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room, which
had been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, with
a fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmony
brought her small puzzles and together they solved them.

"Shall it be a steak to-night?" thus Harmony humbly. "Or chops?"

"With tomato sauce?"

"If Peter allows, yes."

Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:--

"Fish," he would decide. "Fish with egg dressing."

They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.

The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent improvement,
but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many and bitter were the
battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the
litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.

The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully
calculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray on
which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as
a luxury. There was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life for
Peter was spelling itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those
days. He resented anything that took him from them.

There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was
failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones
be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's
great prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had built
his house on the sand, indeed.

So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not materialized.
Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote letters of marvelous
adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured
them under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page of
his childish mind was being written over with new impressions. "Dad" was
already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes
he called Peter "Dad." At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an
agony of tenderness.

And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for the
privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. All
day he had strung little