at the sound of a far-off sea was in them, and the
wind and the movement of distant trees and the shedding and pouring of
faraway moonlight. One by one, delicately and quietly the young men's
voices dropped in, and the sea and the wind and the trees and the
pouring moonlight came near.

When the music ceased Miriam hoped she had not been gazing at the
window. It frightened and disgusted her to see that all the girls seemed
to be sitting up and... being bright... affected. She could hardly
believe it. She flushed with shame.... Fast, horrid... perfect
strangers... it was terrible... it spoilt everything. Sitting up like
that and grimacing.... It was different for Gertrude. How happy Gertrude
must be. She was sitting with her elbows on the table laughing out
across the table about something.... Millie was not being horrid.
She looked just as usual, pudgy and babyish and surprised and half
resentful... it was her eyebrows. Miriam began looking at eyebrows.

There was a sudden silence all round the table. Standing at Fraulein's
side was a young student holding his peaked cap in his hand and bowing
with downcast eyes. Above his pallid scarred face his hair stood
upright. He bowed at the end of each phrase. Miriam's heart bounded in
anticipation. Would Fraulein let them dance after tea, on the grass?

But Fraulein with many smiles and kind words denied the young man's
formally repeated pleadings. They finished tea to the strains of a
funeral march.

2

They were driving swiftly along through the twilight. The warm scents
of the woods stood across the roadway. They breathed them in. Sitting at
the forward end of the brake, Miriam could turn and see the shining of
the road and the edges of the high woods.

Underneath the awning, faces were growing dim. Warm at her side was
Emma. Emma's hand was on her arm under a mass of fern and grasses.
Voices quivered and laughed. Miriam looked again and again at Pastor
Lahmann sitting almost opposite to her, next to Fraulein Pfaff. She
could look at him more easily than at either of the girls. She felt that
only he could feel the beauty of the evening exactly as she did. Several
times she met and quietly contemplated his dark eyes. She felt that
there was someone in those eyes who was neither tiresome nor tame.
She was looking at someone to whom those boys and that dead wife were
nothing. At first he had met her eyes formally, then with obvious
embarrassment, and at last simply