“Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from home—­you said your mother would get insurance, didn’t you?—­and will keep this as a sort of fund to take you home if anything should go wrong—.  But perhaps we are needlessly worried.  In any case, of course it’s a loan, and you can preserve that magnificent independence of yours by sending it back when you get to work to make your fortune.  And if you are doubtful at all, just remember that hopeful little mother of yours who sent you over to get what she had never been able to have for herself, and who planned this for you from the time you were a kiddy and she named you Harmony.

“I’m not saying good-bye.  I can’t.

Scatch.”

That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their crimson feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the salon shook in the draft as if the old Austrian court still danced beneath, Harmony fought her battle.  And a battle it was.  Scatchy and the Big Soprano had not known everything.  There had been no insurance on her father’s life; the little mother was penniless.  A married sister would care for her, but what then?  Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to take her home, and she had—­the hoard under the pillow.  To go back and teach the violin; or to stay and finish under the master, be presented, as he had promised her, at a special concert in Vienna, with all the prestige at home that that would mean, and its resulting possibility of fame and fortune—­which?

She decided to stay.  There might be a concert or so, and she could teach English.  The Viennese were crazy about English.  Some of the stores advertised “English Spoken.”  That would be something to fall back on, a clerkship during the day.

Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went into the Big Soprano’s deserted and disordered room.  The tile stove was warm and comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with most of the teeth gone.  Harmony kissed this unromantic object!  Which reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with loneliness.

She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet under her and thought things out.  At dawn the Portier, crawling out into the cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall and listened.  She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann.  Standing in the doorway in his night attire, his chest open to the frigid morning air, his face upraised to the floor above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.

When the music had died away he went in and closed the door sheepishly.  His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her hand.  She eyed him.

“So!  It is the American Fraulein now!”

“I did but hum a little.  She drags out my heart with her music.”  He fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind, keeping one eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it for him.