No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places.  But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her, became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain.  She must go, must see once again the comfortable glow of Peter’s lamp, the flicker that was the fire.

She ate no supper.  She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain.  She put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed staircase.

The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted.  She achieved the street, however, without molestation.  To the street-car was only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice.  She was white and frightened when she reached the car.

The Siebensternstrasse at last.  The street was always dark; the delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the money drawer.  The gameseller was a religious man.

The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood.  From the time she left the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky, its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by the gate.  Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her.  Peter’s lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight from the salon windows.  The light was not regular—­it disappeared at regular intervals, was blotted out.  Harmony knew what that meant.  Some one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and forward, back and forward.  When he was worried or anxious Peter always paced the door.

She did not know how long she stood there.  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.