rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.

For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing
to make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance
of Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the
tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch
him. Peter was firm.

It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.

"Don't be too obstinate, Peter," she admonished him. "The child needs
occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep up the
financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her
heart's content. That can be her contribution to the general fund."

And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur
from Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna
almost to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make
certain of her usefulness.

A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier
shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of
the brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the
Austrians.

The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least
of all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women,
and Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound
or two in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was
growing round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real
change was in Harmony herself.

The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which
such changes come--not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a breath.
One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion,
quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional
introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman,
tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified
on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic and high
spirits.

The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had
been settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the
Pension Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be
recalled, along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every
odor of stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had
had a bad week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In
vain the sentry