I'll not miss it."
But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.
"I can't take anything now," he said. "But I'll remember it, and
if things get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to
live. Marie is a good manager, almost as good as--Harmony was."
This with difficulty. He found it always hard to speak of
Harmony. His throat seemed to close on the name.
That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental
reservation to see Marie that night and slip her a little money.
Peter need never know, would never notice.
At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian,
Georgiev, got on. He inspected the car carefully before he came
in from the platform, and sat down unobtrusively in a corner.
Things were not going well with him either. His small black eyes
darted from face to face suspiciously, until they came to a rest
on Peter.
It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together
the bits he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to
them Peter's despondent attitude, his strained face, the
abstraction which required a touch on the arm from his companion
when they reached their destination, recalled Peter outside the
door of Harmony's room in the Pension Schwarz--and built him a
little story that was not far from the truth.
Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the
promenade, when the Ring and the larger business streets were
full of people, when Demel's was thronged with pretty women
eating American ices, with military men drinking tea and nibbling
Austrian pastry, the hour when the flower women along the
Stephansplatz did a rousing business in roses, when sterile women
burned candles before the Madonna in the Cathedral, when the
lottery did the record business of the day.
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