ttled the dispute
and clinched the decision by running over the score for a page or two,
turned to find the Portier, ecstatic eyes upturned, hands folded on
paunch, enjoying a delirium of pleasure, and the sentry nowhere in
sight.

He was discovered a moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room, where,
taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention, shoulders
back, arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he was making, with
amazing rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces for the benefit of the
little boy in the bed: marvelous faces they were, in which nose, mouth,
and eyes seemed interchangeable, where features played leapfrog with
one another. When all was over--perhaps when his repertoire was
exhausted--the sentry returned his nose to the center of his face,
replaced eyes and mouth, and wiped the ensemble with a blue cotton
handkerchief. Then, still in silence, he saluted and withdrew, leaving
the youngster enraptured, staring at the doorway.

Harmony had decided the approximate location of her room. In the
higher part of the city, in the sixteenth district, there were many
unpretentious buildings. She had hunted board there and she knew. It
was far from the Stadt, far from the fashionable part of town, a
neighborhood of small shops, of frank indigence. There surely she could
find a room, and perhaps in one of the small stores what she failed to
secure in the larger, a position.

Rosa having taken her soldier away, Harmony secured the Portier's wife
to sit with Jimmy and spent two hours that afternoon looking about for
a room. She succeeded finally in finding one, a small and wretchedly
furnished bedroom, part of the suite of a cheap dressmaker. The approach
was forbidding enough. One entered a cavelike, cobble-paved court
under the building, filled with wagons, feeding horses, quarrelsome and
swearing teamsters. From the side a stone staircase took off and led,
twisting from one landing cave to another, to the upper floor.

Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of
sewing-machines, the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a
home but a hiding-place, took the room at once. She was asked for no
reference. In a sort of agony lest this haven fail her she paid for a
week in advance. The wooden bed, the cracked mirror over the table, even
the pigeons outside on the windowsill were hers for a week.

The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.

"I will have it cleaned," she explai