Americans -- Austria -- Fiction; Love stories; Vienna (Austria) -- Fiction; Violinists -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors' Club. It was
typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not
there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should be Dr. Jennings.
Young McLean was in the reading room, eating his heart out with jealousy
of Peter, vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that night and
fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently if he made the attempt.
He had found a picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a
magazine, and was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and
really in love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and
Harmony were not unlike. The double doors between the reading room and
the reception room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in a rosy future in
which he and Harmony sat together for indefinite periods, with no Peter
to scowl over his books at them, a future in which life was one long
piano-violin duo, with the candles in the chandelier going out one by
one, leaving them at last alone in scented darkness together--McLean
heard nothing until the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.
After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was contemplating
taking Anna's place at the lodge, and he comprehended after a moment
that Anna was already gone. Even then the significance of the situation
was a little time in dawning on him. When it did, however, he rose with
a stifled oath.
Mrs. Boyer was speaking.
“It is exactly as I tell you,” she was saying. “If Peter Byrne is trying
to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally I have been
there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is registered here at the
club as living in the Pension Schwarz. Whatever the facts may be, one
thing remains, she is not there now.”
McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage. He found
a “comfortable” at the curb. The driver was asleep inside the carriage.
McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and shouted an address to him.
The cab bumped along over the rough streets to an accompaniment of
protests from its frantic passenger.
The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter's silence that
afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and significant. He
had thought once or twice that Peter was in love with Harmony; he knew
it now in the clearer vision of the moment. He recalled things that
maddened him: the dozen intimacies of the little menage, the caress
in Peter's voice when he spoke to the girl, Peter's steady eyes in the
semi-gloom of the salon while Harmony played.
At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean cursed,
bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had been gone for
half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he could only see the
girl first, talk to her, tell her what she would be doing by remaining--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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