“Mademoiselle Clara …” Henri de Beauchesne blushed, uncharacteristically bashful. “The reason I am helping … Everything I have done, I have done for you. I must tell you …”

“Oh, please don’t!” said Clara.

“You don’t know what I am going to say!”

“But I do!” Clara was close to tears again, but she also wanted very much to explain. “The thing is, I have just lost—there was this boy, this young man, I loved him so much, and waited for so long, and now … I have just learned that he is dead, and I don’t even know if I can love anymore. I don’t even know if I still loved him—the feeling had become so mixed up with the feeling of waiting. Even my family, my parents—they disapproved of him so strongly, they threw me out of their home. I have been so removed from love for so long, I think I’ve forgotten what it is. So you see, I cannot—I mean, it would be unfair—I mean, I cannot ask you to help us more than you have already so very, very kindly done.”

“Even as a friend? Even if I don’t mind that you don’t love me?”

“Even so.” She tried to smile, but it hurt too much.

Henri looked across the canal to where a clump of daisies on the opposite bank danced in the afternoon breeze. He had a mad notion that he would like to wade across to pick them for her. But then he thought that the gesture would embarrass her, and also that she was the sort of person who probably preferred flowers to be left alive. He felt a surge of anger toward anyone who might hurt her.

“May I ask—if it is not too indiscreet—why your parents disapproved so much of the young man you loved?”

Clara sighed, and he worried that he had offended her. But then she spoke again, very softly.

“He was German,” she said. “But it didn’t matter to me, and it shouldn’t matter to them.”

And then she left.

So much said, so much left unsaid. Clara, hurrying away from Henri along the towpath, wished she had the courage to go back to tell him that in another life, in other circumstances, she might have given him a different answer. He, recovering from her revelation, wanted to call out after her that Max’s nationality didn’t matter to him either, and that he would wait for her, just as she had waited for Max.

And also something else.

“You are wrong,” he wanted to tell her. “You say that you can’t love, but you can. You love those children.”

But Henri didn’t speak, and Clara didn’t go back.