lumination in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, the
rows of hopeful, hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over white
gowns, the soft rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent with
the red beard stepped out and began to read an address--all caught
Harmony by the throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, felt
rather than heard her soft sob.

Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through
Harmony's eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away,
leaving him quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart of
humanity that he had reduced its throbbing to beats that might be
counted. Now, once more, Peter was back in the early days, when a heart
was not a pump, but a thing that ached or thrilled or struggled, that
loved or hated or yearned.

The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turning
festivity into gloom. It played Handel's "Largo"; it threw its whole
soul into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poor
place, that Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deep
vibration of the cello. Harmony fidgeted.

"How terrible!" she whispered. "To turn their Christmas-Eve into
mourning! Stop them!"

"Stop a German orchestra?"

"They are crying, some of them. Oh, Peter!"

The music came to an end at last. Tears were dried. Followed
recitations, gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for the
patients. Then--Harmony.

Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous,
she knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even the
candles burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in a
white coat asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out to
her accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, at
first timidly, then lustily.

Harmony stood alone by the tree, violin poised, smiling at the applause.
Her eyes, running along the dim amphitheater, sought Peter's, and
finding them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and as
softly the others sang.

"Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,"--they sang, with upturned eyes.

"Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht..."

Visions came to Peter that afternoon in the darkness, visions in
which his poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of a
Christmas-Eve in a home that he had earned, of a tree, of a girl-woman,
of a still and holy night, of a child.

"Nur das traute, hoch heilige Pa