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To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be absurd. She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl attracts an unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that he feared he had offended her, than he would have been without this fillip to his interest. But even his concern did not prevent his taking copious and intelligent notes at his lecture that night, or interfere with his enjoyment of the Stein of beer with which, after it was over, he washed down its involved German.

The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not approve of Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of fineness in the man himself--an intangible thing that seems to be a matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container.

Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked to Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the rapid exercise combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that, and the recollection that it was Saturday night and that to-morrow there would be no clinics, no lectures, no operations; that the great shambles would be closed down and that priests would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was whistling as he walked along.

Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped under a street light to consult his watch.

"Almost ten!" he said. "I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart."

"Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?"

"Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make a good woman understand that sort of thing."

"Thank God for that!"

After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the "Humoresque."

Stewart's apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was to be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights were still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs and, for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced as out of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.

"'Out of order'!" he observed. "Out of order since last spring, judging by that card. Vorwarts!"

They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God's country Boyer played golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to forswear the more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular development that his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails, without an ounce of fat, and he climbed the long steep flights with an elasticity that left even Boyer a step or so behind.

Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the sound of beer mugs on wood.

Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men bowed ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and bowing from the waist. Byrne sniffed.

"What do I smell, Marie?" he demanded. "Surely not sausages!"

Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old friend. It was always sausages.

"Sausages, of a truth--fat ones.'

"But surely not with mustard?"

"Ach, ja--englisch mustard."

Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on Byrne's arm.

"I was very angry with you to-day."

"With me?"

Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart's unconventional menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart's custom of addressing Marie in English, while she replied in her own tongue.

"Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein's hat, and you--She is rich, so?"

"I really don't know. I think not."

"And good?"

"Yes, of course."

Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking up at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard. Rather,