was jerking at a knot in
her thread.

"It's in the most damnable knot!" she said, and Harmony was suddenly
aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.

"Please don't pay any attention to me," she implored. "I hate to sew.
That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm a fool
about music."

"Perhaps, if you hate to sew--"

"I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate
being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and
clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse
and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had any children!"

Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next
moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was
smiling up through her glasses.

"The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I'm
really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food's bad
and I can't afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a room and do my own
cooking, but what time have I?" She spread out the pieces of flannel on
her knee. "Does this look like anything to you?"

"A petticoat, isn't it?"

"I didn't intend it as a petticoat."

"I thought, on account of the scallops--"

"Scallops!" Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from
them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.

"Scallops!" she gasped at last. "Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me cutting
'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!"

Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately
flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little
adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to
Peter--Peter's future, Peter's poverty, Peter's refusing to have his
hair cut, Peter's encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel
Peter almost fought. It developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had
the choice of weapons, and had chosen fists, and that the major had been
carried away. Dr. Gates grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back
on the pink flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces,
united, were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the
hospital. "Although," she commented, "it looks more like a chair cover."

Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined
with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the
crooked edges she told the doctor about t