One of the soft rains
was falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air
was hardly cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the
glow died lower and lower, until at last it was impossible to
trace the pacing figure. No one came to any of the windows. The
little lamp before the shrine in the wild-game shop burned itself
out; the Portier across the way came to the door, glanced up at
the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of the chain as it
was stretched across the door inside.
Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's
windows--and Peter's--opened toward the back of the house, where
in a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her
washing, and where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A
wild and reckless desire to see at least the light from the
child's room possessed Harmony. Even the light would be
something; to go like this, to carry with her only the memory of
a dark looming house without cheer was unthinkable. The gate was
never locked. If she but went into the garden and round by the
spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be something.
She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror
for her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various
articles on her window-sill and of instigating searches for them
at untimely hours of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in
the rabbit hutch! So Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way
by the big spruce to the corner of the old lodge and thus to the
courtyard.
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