I'd like to do something. I'm a useless cub in
a sick-room, but I could do that. Who's the woman he liked in the
hospital?"

"Nurse Elisabet. I don't know, Mac. There's no reason why I shouldn't
let you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but--if he would be
happier--"

"That's settled, then," said McLean. "Nurse Elisabet, if she can come.
And--look here, old man. I 've been trying to say this for a week and
haven't had the nerve. Let me help you out for a while. You can send it
back when you get it, any time, a year or ten years. I'll not miss it."

But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.

"I can't take anything now," he said. "But I'll remember it, and if
things get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to live.
Marie is a good manager, almost as good as--Harmony was." This with
difficulty. He found it always hard to speak of Harmony. His throat
seemed to close on the name.

That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental reservation to
see Marie that night and slip her a little money. Peter need never know,
would never notice.

At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian, Georgiev,
got on. He inspected the car carefully before he came in from the
platform, and sat down unobtrusively in a corner. Things were not going
well with him either. His small black eyes darted from face to face
suspiciously, until they came to a rest on Peter.

It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits
he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's
despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a
touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination,
recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension
Schwarz--and built him a little story that was not far from the truth.

Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the promenade,
when the Ring and the larger business streets were full of people,
when Demel's was thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with
military men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when
the flower women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in
roses, when sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the
Cathedral, when the lottery did the record business of the day.

It was Peter's forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he might
happen on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always as