“One is sick, Jimmy boy,” he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and shivering, on the pillow.  After a minute:—­

“If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?”

“Yes, honey, I think so.”

The boy was silent for a time.  Thinking was easier than speech.  His mind too worked slowly.  It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes.  Peter bent over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.

“What is it, dear?”

“I’m afraid—­it’s going to die!”

“Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?” asked Peter gently.  “To go to heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer and the sun always shines?”

No reply for a moment.  The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed its nose with a pinkish paw.  The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their dead mother.

“Is there grass?”

“Yes—­soft green grass.”

“Do—­boys in heaven—­go in their bare feet?” Ah, small mind and heart, so terrified and yet so curious!

“Indeed, yes.”  And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint—­a heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of dear departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees in fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers.  Painted his heaven with smiling eyes and death in his heart, a child’s heaven of games and friendly Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.

The boy listened.  He was silent when Peter had finished.  Speech was increasingly an effort.

“I should—­like—­to go there,” he whispered at last.

He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at dusk he roused again.

“I would like—­to see—­the sentry,” he said with difficulty.

And so again, and for the last time, Rosa’s soldier from Salzburg with one lung.

Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work, unaccustomed muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears.  Monia, upset over the morning’s excitement, was irritable and unreasonable.  The gold-tissue costume had come back from Le Grande with a complaint.  Below in the courtyard all day curious groups stood gaping up the staircase, where the morning had seen such occurrences.

At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in pails of salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen into the way of playing for them.  To the music-loving Viennese girls this was the hour of the day.  To sit back, soup bowl on knee, the machines silent, Monia quarreling in the kitchen with the Hungarian servant, and while the pigeons ate crusts on the window-sills, to hear this American girl play such music as was played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her whole beautiful face and body glowing