Also he had said he was not in love with her.  Was he so sure of that?

At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had managed to warm the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off, Anna Gates knocked at his door.

“Yes?” said Peter, still comfortably asleep.

“It is Dr. Gates.”

“Sorry, Doctor—­have to ’xcuse me,” mumbled Peter from the blanket.

“Peter!”

Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up in bed.

“Well?”

“Open the door just a crack.”

Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the coverings up to retain as much heat as possible.  An icy blast from the open window blew round him, setting everything movable in the little room to quivering.  He fumbled in the dark for his slippers, failed to find them, and yawning noisily went to the door.

Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside.  Her short, graying hair was out of its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising six-inch plait down her back.  She had no glasses, and over the candle-frame she peered shortsightedly at Peter.

“It’s about Jimmy,” she said.  “I don’t know what’s got into me, but I’ve forgotten for three days.  It’s a good bit more than time for a letter.”

“Great Scott!”

“Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted a little.  The nurse found him crying.”

“The poor little devil!” said Peter contritely.  “Overdue, is it?  I’ll fix it to-night.”

“Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning.  I’m off at seven.”

“The envelope?”

“Here it is.  And take my candle.  I’m going to bed.”

That was at midnight or shortly after.  Half after one struck from the twin clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the Stephansplatz across the city.  It found Peter with the window closed, sitting up in bed, a candle balanced on one knee, a writing-tablet on the other.

He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he had taken part that day, including a detailed description of the quarry, which weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty pounds, Peter being strong on imagination and short on facts as regards the Alpine chamois.  Then, trying to read the letter from a small boy’s point of view and deciding that it lacked snap, he added by way of postscript a harrowing incident of avalanche, rope, guide, and ice axe.  He ended in a sort of glow of authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off the chamois.

The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to Jimmy Conroy—­an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic, bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny village in the Austrian Tyrol.

It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled himself to sleep.

It was just two o’clock when the night nurse, making rounds in her ward in the general hospital, found a small boy very much awake on his pillow, and taking off her felt slipper shook it at him in pretended fury.