Inside the clerks had noticed him.  Two of them standing together by the desk spoke of him:  “He is there again, the gray man!”

“Ah, so!  But, yes, there is his back!”

“Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps.”

“More likely Le Grande, the American.  He is American.”

“He is Russian.  Look at his size.”

“But his shoes!” triumphantly.  “They are American, little one.”

The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden rose made for the hair.  She placed it in a box carefully.

“I think he is of the police,” she said, “or a spy.  There is much talk of war.”

“Foolishness!  Does a police officer sigh always?  Or a spy have such sadness in his face?  And he grows thin and white.”

“The rose, Fraulein.”

The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer.  The customer, however, was not looking.  She was gazing with strange intentness at the back of a worn gray overcoat.  Then with a curious clutch at her heart she went white.  Harmony, of course, Harmony come to fetch the golden rose that was to complete Le Grande’s costume.

She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another exit.

She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and steady ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.

It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her.  He had proposed to her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for her.  And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different.  Even then he had not said he loved her—­had not even known it, to be exact.  Nor had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him out of her life.

The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so enlightening as to poor Peter’s quest, that Peter was growing thin and white, made her almost reel.  She had been too occupied with her own position to realize Peter’s.  With the glimpse of him came a great longing for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy’s arms about her neck, for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating harmlessly against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the brick stove, for Peter.

Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her.  But to go back meant, at the best, adding to Peter’s burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the old situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the respectability of the establishment.  And other doubts assailed her.  What if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not let his mother see him!

Monia Reiff was very busy that day.  Harmony did not leave the workroom until eight o’clock.  During all that time, while her slim fingers worked over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had seen him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping watch over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady eyes for her.