The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly blind.  Thus it happened that, although the night was clear when the twin dials of the Votivkirche showed nine o’clock, he did not notice a cab that halted across the street from the hospital.

Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen feet of him, carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a blanket and insisting on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able the next day to say that he had observed such a person carrying a bundle, but that it was a short stocky person, quite lame, and that the bundle was undoubtedly clothing going to the laundry.

Perhaps—­it is just possible—­the sentry had his suspicions.  It is undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter’s knee, with Peter’s arm close about him, looked back at the hospital, the sentry was going through the manual of arms very solemnly under the stars and facing toward the carriage.

CHAPTER XIV

For two days at Semmering it rained.  The Raxalpe and the Schneeberg sulked behind walls of mist.  From the little balcony of the Pension Waldheim one looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there by islands that were crags or by the tops of sunken masts that were evergreen trees.  The roads were masses of slippery mud, up which the horses steamed and sweated.  The gray cloud fog hung over everything; the barking of a dog loomed out of it near at hand where no dog was to be seen.  Children cried and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.

During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the mountain with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains.  In the morning, the rain clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow line of the slip.

Everything was saturated with moisture.  It did no good to close the heavy wooden shutters at night:  in the morning the air of the room was sticky and clothing was moist to the touch.  Stewart, confined to the house, grew irritable.

Marie watched him anxiously.  She knew quite well by what slender tenure she held her man.  They had nothing in common, neither speech nor thought.  And the little Marie’s love for Stewart, grown to be a part of her, was largely maternal.  She held him by mothering him, by keeping him comfortable, not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time have brought him to her in chains.

And now he was uncomfortable.  He chafed against the confinement; he resented the food, the weather.  Even Marie’s content at her unusual leisure irked him.  He accused her of purring like a cat by the fire, and stamped out more than once, only to be driven in by the curious thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.

On the night of the second day the weather changed.  Marie, awakening early, stepped out on to the balcony and closed the door carefully behind her.  A new world lay beneath her, a marvel of glittering branches, of white plain far below; the snowy mane of the Raxalpe was become a garment.  And from behind the villa came the cheerful sound of sleigh-bells, of horses’ feet on crisp snow, of runners sliding easily along frozen roads.  Even the barking of the dog in the next yard had ceased rumbling and become sharp staccato.