ild-game store next a light
was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the
money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.

The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left
the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky,
its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by
the gate. Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her.
Peter's lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight
from the salon windows. The light was not regular--it disappeared at
regular intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some
one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and
forward, back and forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always
paced the door.

She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was
falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly
cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower
and lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure.
No one came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in
the wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to
the door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of
the chain as it was stretched across the door inside.

Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's
windows--and Peter's--opened toward the back of the house, where in
a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and
where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless
desire to see at least the light from the child's room possessed
Harmony. Even the light would be something; to go like this, to carry
with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was
unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden
and round by the spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be
something.

She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for
her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her
window-sill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours
of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So
Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the
corner of the old lodge and thus to the courtyard.

Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving
shadows; on Jimm