"They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to
be alone together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could
swallow for the lump in my throat, by myself. I was homesick
enough in old Wien, but I am just as homesick now that I am here,
for we are really homesick only for people, not places. And no
one really cared whether I came back or not."
Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day
before, but with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the
situation was unpleasant and decide to leave? What if a reckless
impulse, recklessly carried out, were to break up an arrangement
that had made a green oasis of happiness and content for all of
them in the desert of their common despair?
If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to
argue, to justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally.
He almost groaned aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the
wintry garden.
He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his
word. "I am not a beast. I'll let you alone," he had said. She
had had a bad night, as nights go. She had gone through the
painful introspection which, in a thoroughly good girl, always
follows such an outburst as Peter's. Had she said or done
anything to make him think--Surely she had not! Had she been
wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.
While the Portier's wife, waked, as may happen, by an
unaccustomed silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron
candlestick in hand, Harmony, having read the Litany through in
the not particularly religious hope of getting to sleep, was
dreaming placidly.
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