The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back
toward the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and
melted with a chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression.
The upper spires of the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist;
the trees in the park took on, against the gloom of the city
hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for an occasional pedestrian,
making his way home under an umbrella, the streets were deserted.
Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl rejected his
offer of a taxicab.
"We should be home too quickly," she observed naively. "And we
have so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by
giving English lessons in the afternoon and working all morning
at my music--"
And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening
gravely, his head bent. And square after square it was borne in
on him what a precarious future stretched before this girl beside
him, how very slender her resources, how more than dubious the
outcome.
Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate
deep into his soul that night.
Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had
reestablished a friendship and made a working basis for future
comradely relations, they were back at the corner of the
Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned in at the little street,
a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided with Harmony. He was a
short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled mustache, and he
was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin heart in his
voice, the barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann.
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