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!"
"What in the world--"
"And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr Georgiev eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her."
Dr. Jennings was puzzled.
"She wishes to know where the girl lives," she interpreted to Mrs. Boyer. "A man wishes to know."
"Naturally!" said Mrs. Boyer. "Well, don't tell her."
Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was not to be told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the Herr Georgiev, Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open windows, and hot water were inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings listened, then waved her back with a gesture.
"She says," she interpreted as they walked on, "that Dr. Peter--by which I suppose she means Dr. Byrne--has left a necktie, and that she'll be in hot water if she does not return it."
Mrs. Boyer sniffed.
"In love with him, probably, like the others!" she said.