he great room was warm and cheery. The table was drawn near the
stove and laid for Abendessen. The white porcelain coffee-pot had
boiled and extinguished itself, according to its method, and now gently
steamed.

On to the kitchen. Much odor of food here, two candles lighted
but burning low, a small platter with money on it, quite a little
money--almost all he had left Harmony when he went away.

Peter was dazed at first. Even when Marie, hastily summoned, had
discovered that Harmony's clothing was gone, when a search of the rooms
revealed the absence of her violin and her music, when at last the fact
stared them, incontestable, in the face, Peter refused to accept it. He
sat for a half-hour or even more by the fire in the salon, obstinately
refusing to believe she was gone, keeping the supper warm against her
return. He did not think or reason, he sat and waited, saying nothing,
hardly moving, save when a gust of wind slammed the garden gate. Then he
was all alive, sat erect, ears straining for her hand on the knob of the
outer door.

The numbness of the shock passed at last, to be succeeded by alarm.
During all the time that followed, that condition persisted, fright,
almost terror. Harmony alone in the city, helpless, dependent,
poverty-stricken. Harmony seeking employment under conditions Peter knew
too well. But with his alarm came rage.

Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the
frightened Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation after
accusation against some unnamed woman to whom he applied epithets that
Marie's English luckily did not comprehend. Not a particularly heroic
figure was Peter that night: a frantic, disheveled individual, before
whom the Portier cowered, who struggled back to sanity through a berserk
haze and was liable to swift relapses into fury again.

To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be Peter's
for many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim determination to keep
on searching.

There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the cabstands in
the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The delicatessen seller
had seen her go out that afternoon with a bundle and return without it.
She had been gone only an hour or so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that
she might have found a haven in the neighborhood--until he recalled the
parcel-post.

One possibility he cl