"I've had a
terrific row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!"
It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development,
after everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She
had clung, at first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of
affection, to the sharp little doctor with her mannish
affectations, her soft and womanly heart.
"Sit down, child." Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. "You are
fagged out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to
me? How much did it cost the three of us to live in this abode of
virtue?"
It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.
"I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional,
but it will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will
be cheaper, I'm sure of that: We are all going out to the
hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa, and Harmony shall keep house for
us!"
CHAPTER IX
It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her
trunk in the cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the
conversational bomb that left empty three rooms in the Pension
Schwarz.
Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the
lodge of Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars--back, but
with a difference. True, the gate still swung back and forward on
rusty hinges, obedient to every whim of the December gales; but
the casement windows in the salon no longer creaked or admitted
drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll of rubber weather-casing.
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