McLean was Peter’s great support in those terrible days.  He was young and hopeful.  Also he had money.  Peter could not afford to grease the machinery of the police service; McLean could and did.  In Berlin Harmony could not have remained hidden for two days.  In Vienna, however, it was different.  Returns were made to the department, but irregularly.  An American music student was missing.  There were thousands of American music students in the city:  one fell over them in the coffee-houses.  McLean offered a reward and followed up innumerable music students.

The alternating hope and despair was most trying.  Peter became old and haggard; the boy grew thin and white.  But there was this difference, that with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on hour, day on day.  With McLean each night found him worn and exhausted, but each following morning he went to work with renewed strength and energy.  Perhaps, after all, the iron had not struck so deep into his soul.  With Peter it was a life-and-death matter.

Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for work.  The little household went on methodically.  Marie remained; there had seemed nothing else to do.  She cooked Peter’s food—­what little he would eat; she nursed Jimmy while Peter was out on the long search; and she kept the apartment neat.  She was never intrusive, never talkative.  Indeed, she seemed to have lapsed into definite silence.  She deferred absolutely to Peter, adored him, indeed, from afar.  She never ate with him, in spite of his protests.

The little apartment was very quiet.  Where formerly had been music and Harmony’s soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont to argue with Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the prisms of the chandelier had once vibrated in response to Harmony’s violin, almost absolute silence now reigned.  Even the gate, having been repaired, no longer creaked, and the loud altercations between the Portier and his wife had been silenced out of deference to the sick child.

On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered Jimmy’s mother in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually bad day.  McLean had sent him a note by messenger early in the morning, to the effect that a young girl answering Harmony’s description had been seen in the park at Schonbrunn and traced to an apartment near by.

Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible.  They had gone out together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope.  And it had been as he feared—­a pretty little violin student, indeed, who had been washing her hair, and only opened the door an inch or two.

McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to speak.  Then back to the city again.