“Good-night, dear,” he whispered.  “Goodnight, Harmony.”

Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and supper that day.  The reason of their call proved to be neither rooms nor pension.  They came to make inquiries.

The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge of the bed in the room that had once been Peter’s and that still lacked an occupant.

Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly medical.  There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head.  Frau Schwarz, on the edge of Peter’s tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter was a bad lot.  Not that she resorted only to the sign language.

“The women were also wicked,” she said.  “Of a man what does one expect?  But of a woman!  And the younger one looked—­Herr Gott!  She had the eyes of a saint!  The little Georgiev was mad for her.  When the three of them left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me.  The Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he so to me!”

“She says,” interpreted Dr. Jennings, “that they were a bad lot—­that the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!”

Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on the other woman’s arm.

“What an escape for you!” she said.  “If you had gone there to live and then found the establishment—­queer!”

From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.  Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.

“American ladies!” said Olga.  “Two, old and fat.”

“More hot water!” growled Katrina.  “Why do not the Americans stay in their own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the earth.”

Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.

“Sh!  They do not come for rooms.  They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne and the others!”

“No!”

“Of a certainty.”

“Then let me to the door!”

“A moment.  She tells them everything and more.  She says—­how she is wicked, Katrina!  She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she sent them all away.  Here, take the door!”

Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her head.  “The Frau Schwarz is wrong,” cried Olga passionately in Vienna dialect.  “They were good, all of them!”