Then something unexpected: a calibrated eruption of clapping in 6/8 time. From the palms of Private Black. He stood at twelve o’clock on the herringbone floor, head thrown back, chest out, arms akimbo, and a line of three flowers tucked into the folds of his jacket. He struck up a graceful posture droit. On the distant stucco walls, heretofore unnoticed, were trompe l’oeil flowers and trees and birds painted in the seventeenth century and now somewhat decrepitly peeling, but warm and welcoming, as if the dance floor were a quiet glade.

As the red-tailed hawk fluffs up the ruff of feathers on his neck, his hunting eye angled toward the female, so Hugo had issued a challenge. He launched into the galliard, a dance best attempted by virtuosos. It hardly seemed possible for a man who had sloshed through a toast and spilled wine on his torn and soiled trousers, a man in slippery gunboat-sized boots, but there it was: a cunningly graceful pied gauche en l’air avec petit saut, which even their dance teacher had looked like a frog when executing. But he was Nijinsky, he was a loping faun, he was Douglas Fairbanks leaping over a table. Then Hugo’s legs scissored so that the floor appeared to ripple beneath them. He descended with the weightlessness of an angel.

Once in a posture gauche, he began a new cinq pas, the delicate fore-and-aft galliard. He extended his hands, clapped them again in that irresistible summoning, and then came to his senses. He wobbled, blinking. He had been audacious and foolish and, for a moment, happy. What chance was there of that continuing?

He watched his princesses watch him; his heart, in his throat, was not his own.

Though it is true that history does not exactly repeat itself, some patterns are eerily familiar. Such as courtship. There are doorways into other, friendlier places that seem to open simply by the kindness of happenstance. So, even if Hugo was not quite Douglas Fairbanks carrying Mary Pickford across a stream and into Sunnyside, he had just heroically defended something more real than movie-star royalty against something more dangerous than wet shoes and slippery rocks. And now he was inviting them onto a dance floor surrounded by a pastoral of painted birch trees and distant, warbling finches, where the war and its deprivations might— if only for a moment—slip away into grace. Was his good intent enough to move them?

Oh, yes. The three princesses glided across the floor and toward their instruments.

Aarne, who had maintained a discreet distance, preparing coffee and a tray of digestifs, picked up his old shakestaff. Hugo handed Anna (since she was the eldest) a flower, led her to the center of the floor, and bowed toward Maria and Vasilisa. Aarne suggested, with all humility, that Maria switch to recorder and they play “Der Kuninc Rudolf.” Though it was more of a troubadour’s song, its rhythms were simple.