you need some one to look after you--I'll not
say like a brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor
brothers to their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and
who isn't going to fall in love with you."

"I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you
to."

"Certainly not. Besides, I--" Here Peter Byrne had another inspiration,
not so good as the first--"Besides, there is somebody at home, you
understand? That makes it all right, doesn't it?"

"A girl at home?"

"A girl," said Peter, lying manfully.

"How very nice!" said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all
sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of
their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers
and street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to
themselves. Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked
blissful personalities, Harmony's future, Peter's career, money--or
its lack--their ambitions, their hopes, even--and here was intimacy,
indeed!--their disappointments, their failures of courage, their
occasional loss of faith in themselves.

The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward
the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a
chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of
the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took
on, against the gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for
an occasional pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the
streets were deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl
rejected his offer of a taxicab.

"We should be home too quickly," she observed naively. "And we have
so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English
lessons in the afternoon and working all morning at my music--"

And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely,
his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what
a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very
slender her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.

Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep
into his soul that night.

Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a
friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they
were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned
in at the l