"Certainly not," he agreed cheerfully. "That is up to you, of course. I
didn't know. We're looking for you to-night."

A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne, but the
situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.

"I'll be round," he said. "I have a lecture and I may be late, but I'll
come."

The "Kid" was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in air,
angrily flushed.

"You saw!" she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped a hand
through her arm. "He protects her from me! It is because of you. Before
I knew you--"

"Before you knew me, little one," he said cheerfully, "you were exactly
what you are now."

She paused on the curb and raised her voice.

"So! And what is that?"

"Beautiful as the stars, only--not so remote."

In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The
"beautiful" calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused her
suspicion.

"Remote? What is that?"

"I was thinking of Worthington."

The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.

In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of
soldiers trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the pavement
and dodged verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and German epithets. He
drew his chin into the up-turned collar of his overcoat and waited, an
absurdly patient figure, until the hail of consonants had subsided
into a rain of tears. Then he took the girl's elbow again and led her,
childishly weeping, into a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and
eyes of the Alserstrasse.

Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl was
closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not his, or
of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely, alluring, rather
puzzled at this moment, was also a situation. For there was a situation.
He had suspected it that morning, listening to the delicatessen-seller's
narrative of Rosa's account of the disrupted colony across in the old
lodge; he had been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the
dark entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright
light of the coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her beauty, the
emotional coming and going of her color, her frank loneliness, and God
save the mark!--her trust in him, he accepted the situation and adopted
it: his responsibility, if you please.

He straightened under it. He knew the old city