et from the hospital.

Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen feet of
him, carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a blanket and
insisting on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able the next day to
say that he had observed such a person carrying a bundle, but that
it was a short stocky person, quite lame, and that the bundle was
undoubtedly clothing going to the laundry.

Perhaps--it is just possible--the sentry had his suspicions. It is
undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter's knee, with Peter's arm
close about him, looked back at the hospital, the sentry was going
through the manual of arms very solemnly under the stars and facing
toward the carriage.

CHAPTER XIV

For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe and the Schneeberg
sulked behind walls of mist. From the little balcony of the Pension
Waldheim one looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there
by islands that were crags or by the tops of sunken masts that were
evergreen trees. The roads were masses of slippery mud, up which the
horses steamed and sweated. The gray cloud fog hung over everything; the
barking of a dog loomed out of it near at hand where no dog was to be
seen. Children cried and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.

During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the mountain
with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the morning, the rain
clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow line of the
slip.

Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close the
heavy wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the room was
sticky and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart, confined to the
house, grew irritable.

Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender
tenure she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither speech nor
thought. And the little Marie's love for Stewart, grown to be a part of
her, was largely maternal. She held him by mothering him, by keeping him
comfortable, not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time have
brought him to her in chains.

And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against the confinement; he
resented the food, the weather. Even Marie's content at her unusual
leisure irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat by the fire,
and stamped out more than once, only to be driven in by the curious
thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.

On the night of the second day th