“From Paris!” he said.  “Who in the world—­I suppose I’d better open it.”

“So I thought.  It appears a letter of—­how you say it?  Ah, yes, condolence.”

Peter opened the letter and read it.  Then without a word he gave it open to the Dozent.  There was silence in the laboratory while the Dozent read it, silence except for his canary, which was chipping at a lump of sugar.  Peter’s face was very sober.

“So.  A mother!  You knew nothing of a mother?”

“Something from the papers I found.  She left when the boy was a baby—­went on the stage, I think.  He has no recollection of her, which is a good thing.  She seems to have been a bad lot.”

“She comes to take him away.  That is impossible.”

“Of course it is impossible,” said Peter savagely.  “She’s not going to see the child if I can help it.  She left because—­she’s the boy’s mother, but that’s the best you can say of her.  This letter—­Well, you’ve read it.”

“She is as a stranger to him?”

“Absolutely.  She will come in mourning—­look at that black border—­and tell him his father is dead, and kill him.  I know the type.”

The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent twitched, as does the beard of one who plots.  Peter re-read the gushing letter in his hand and thought fiercely.

“She is on her way here,” said the Dozent.  “That is bad.  Paris to Wien is two days and a night.  She may hourly arrive.”

“We might send him away—­to another hospital.”

The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.

“Had I a home—­” he said, and glanced through the door to the portrait on the stand.  “It would be possible to hide the boy, at least for a time.  In the interval the mother might be watched, and if she proved a fit person the boy could be given to her.  It is, of course, an affair of police.”

This gave Peter pause.  He had no money for fines, no time for imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail.  He read the letter again, and tried to read into the lines Jimmy’s mother, and failed.  He glanced into the ward.  Still Jimmy slept.  A burly convalescent, with a saber cut from temple to ear and the general appearance of an assassin, had stopped beside the bed and was drawing up the blanket round the small shoulders.

“I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day,” said the Dozent.  “That gives us a few hours.  She will go to the police, and to-morrow she will be admitted.  In the mean time—­”

“In the mean time,” Peter replied, “I’ll try to think of something.  If I thought she could be warned and would leave him here—­”

“She will not.  She will buy him garments and she will travel with him through the Riviera and to Nice.  She says Nice.  She wishes to be there for carnival, and the boy will die.”