ed a moist handkerchief.

"I shall be very good," she promised him. The last words he heard above
the grinding of the train were her cheery: "To America!"

Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food
where he might happen to be, buying a little now and then from the
delicatessen shop across the street. For Harmony had gone back to the
house in the Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all was over and until
Marie's small preparations for departure were over. Then, while Peter
was at the station, she slipped away again. But this time she left her
address. She wrote:--

"You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely before
and that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I cannot stay in
the Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight to make, and you have
been trying to fight for us all, for Marie, for dear little Jimmy, for
me. You must get back to work now; you have lost so much time. And I
am managing well. The Frau Professor is back and will take an evening
lesson, and soon I shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can
see how things are looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to
renew my music lessons. And then, Peter,--the career!

"HARMONY."

Her address was beneath.

Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood with
the letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He could offer
her nothing but his shabby self, his problematic future. Perhaps,
surely, everything would have been settled, without reason, had he only
once taken the girl in his arms, told her she was the breath of life
itself to him. But adversity, while it had roused his fighting spirit in
everything else, had sapped his confidence.

He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found himself
confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a tired, lined
face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with a sick child's head
against its breast.

So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time he must
let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry herself on to
success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and ability. And she had
proved the thing he had not dared to believe, that she could take care
of herself in the old city. Only--to go away and leave her there!

McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony's address in the
Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he had seen
during the la