hes were arranged, sighing
and lamenting gently, "Ware ich nur zu Hause"--how happy one was
at home--her little voice filled with tears and her cheeks flushed,
"haypie, haypie to home," she complained as she slid her music into its
case, "where all so good, so nice, so beautiful," and they had gone,
side by side, up the dark uncarpeted stone stairs leading from the
basement to the hall. Half-way up, Emma had given Miriam a shy firm hug
and then gone decorously up the remainder of the flight.

The sense of that sudden little embrace recurred often to Miriam during
the course of the first day.

It was unlike any contact she had known--more motherly than her
mother's. Neither of her sisters could have embraced her like that.
She did not know that a human form could bring such a sense of warm
nearness, that human contours could be eloquent--or anyone so sweetly
daring.

2

That first evening at Waldstrasse there had been a performance that had
completed the transformation of Miriam's English ideas of "music." She
had caught the word "Vorspielen" being bandied about the long tea-table,
and had gathered that there was to be an informal playing of "pieces"
before Fraulein Pfaff. She welcomed the event. It relieved her from the
burden of being in high focus--the relief had come as soon as she took
her place at the gaslit table. No eye seemed to notice her. The English
girls having sat out two meal-times with her, had ceased the hard-eyed
observation which had made the long silence of the earlier repasts only
less embarrassing than Fraulein's questions about England. The four
Germans who had neither stared nor even appeared aware of her existence,
talked cheerfully across the table in a general exchange that included
tall Fraulein Pfaff smiling her horse-smile--Miriam provisionally called
it--behind the tea-urn, as chairman. The six English-speaking girls,
grouped as it were towards their chief, a dark-skinned, athletic
looking Australian with hot, brown, slightly blood-shot eyes sitting
as vice-president opposite Fraulein, joined occasionally, in solo and
chorus, and Miriam noted with relief a unanimous atrocity of accent
in their enviable fluency. Rapid _sotto voce_ commentary and
half-suppressed wordless by-play located still more clearly the English
quarter. Animation flowed and flowed. Miriam safely ignored, scarcely
heeding, but warmed and almost happy, basked. She munched her black
bread and butter, liberally s