“It’s possible, you see, that he thought you didn’t love him. And a chap who believes he’s lost the love of a woman—forgive me—a woman such as you—well, I daresay it might ruin him.” Mr. Thorpe pauses. “That’s only conjecture, mind you. I haven’t met the lucky Herr von Kleist.”

“No, you haven’t.”

Another slight squeeze. Elfriede capitulates. The lure of comfort is too much for her. Warm human contact. Warm human arms, warm human chest. Things for which she’s starved. A famine of touch.

“Thank you for your music,” Wilfred says. “I was afraid you’d stop.”

“I wasn’t sure whether I should. I didn’t want to keep you awake.”

“Keep me awake? Kept me alive, I think.”

“Oh!”

“So why did you? Keep playing, I mean.”

“Because I . . . well, I . . .” She shouldn’t say the words, but she must. She might conceal her true thoughts from the doctor, but she can’t conceal them from Wilfred. Oh, his actual heart, thudding under her ear! She whispers, “Because I thought you might be listening.”

“Damn it all,” he says softly.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Just hellish fate, that’s all.”

Elfriede says, “Tell me about this girl of yours.”

“Girl? Girl? I’m afraid I don’t know any other girls.”

“You told me there was a girl.”

There is a sigh from inside that ravaged chest, far more sigh than Elfriede might have imagined possible. It ends in a cough. Not a bad one. Not the cough of two weeks ago.

“Right. Her. Well, you know, she’s quite the opposite of you. Older and rather cosmopolitan. Divorcée of a well-known composer, I won’t say whom. Just the sort of woman to render a callow youth—an ugly, awkward fellow such as myself—dizzy with ecstasy.”

“And did she?”

“Yes.”

“Pardon me,” says Elfriede, smiling a little, “but you don’t sound ecstatic.”

“That’s because . . .”

“Because?”

“Because I shall have to go back to her shortly, I suppose. And the prospect is not what it once was. Don’t ask why.”

“Why?”

That noise again. “Let’s just sit here a moment longer, shall we? I daresay we’re not doing anybody any harm, just sitting here.”

“No.”

“I’m a man of honor.”

“Yes.”

“Unlike, I suspect, that blackguard Hermann.”

“Let’s not talk,” she says.

“An ugly, awkward chap like me. Emaciated with fever. Head like a pumpkin—why are you laughing?”

“That’s exactly what I thought, when I first saw you. Your head like a pumpkin.”

“Ah, well. At least a fellow knows where he stands.”

Elfriede stares at the trees opposite. The dark woods beyond. The wind whining quietly between the pine needles. “I love your pumpkin head.”

“But you hardly know my head.”

“You hardly know mine. Does it matter?”