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Page 80

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, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr
Georgiev eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her."

Dr. Jennings was puzzled.

"She wishes to know where the girl lives," she interpreted to
Mrs. Boyer. "A man wishes to know."

"Naturally!" said Mrs. Boyer. "Well, don't tell her."

Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was
not to be told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the
Herr Georgiev, Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open
windows, and hot water were inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings
listened, then waved her back with a gesture.

"She says," she interpreted as they walked on, "that Dr.
Peter--by which I suppose she means Dr. Byrne--has left a
necktie, and that she'll be in hot water if she does not return
it."

Mrs. Boyer sniffed.

"In love with him, probably, like the others!" she said.

CHAPTER XIX

Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very
early and without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying
diagonally across his small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets.
The communicating door into Harmony's room was open. Peter kept
his eyes carefully from it, but his ears were less under control.
He could hear her soft breathing. There were days coming when
Peter would stand where he stood then and listen, and find only
silence.

He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully
behind him and lighting a match to find his way down the
staircase. The Portier was not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and
to stand by while he donned the trousers which he deemed
necessary to the dignity of his position before he opened the
street door.

Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter.
The dawn grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The
hurrying crowds at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his
coffee, taken from a bare table in the station. The horizontal
morning sunlight, shining in through marvelously clean windows,
warmed the marble of the floor, made black shadows beside the
heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into gold the hair of a
toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The same morning
light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of one of
his shoes. Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at
the bits of dust that floated in the sunshine.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Fri 26th Dec 2025, 11:05

The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart