German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly
medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of
language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life
are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual
disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised
eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of
Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter
was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the sign language.

"The women were also wicked," she said. "Of a man what does one expect?
But of a woman! And the younger one looked--Herr Gott! She had the eyes
of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her. When the three of them
left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me. The
Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he
so to me!"

"She says," interpreted Dr. Jennings, "that they were a bad lot--that
the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!"

Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on
the other woman's arm.

"What an escape for you!" she said. "If you had gone there to live and
then found the establishment--queer!"

From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.
Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.

"American ladies!" said Olga. "Two, old and fat."

"More hot water!" growled Katrina. "Why do not the Americans stay in
their own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the
earth."

Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.

"Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne
and the others!"

"No!"

"Of a certainty."

"Then let me to the door!"

"A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says--how she is
wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she
sent them all away. Here, take the door!"

Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the
dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having
retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best
forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a
slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her
head. "The Frau Schwarz is wrong," cried Olga passionately in Vienna
dialect. "They were good, all of them!"

"What in the world--"

"And, please,