“You dance, don’t you?”

Again she nodded.

“Well, you’ll have to rest. You can’t dance with an arm in a sling, and that’s what you’ll have to have.” He spoke plainly, as he always did, but with compassion and increasing doubt as to whether she understood him. “You know some English?” he queried.

“Ein wenig … a little …”

He smiled more easily. “That’s about how much I speak your language, too.”

He was prepared then for the torrent of words that usually outpours if one confesses even a slight knowledge of a stranger’s tongue; but to his surprise she was silent.

He tried to make conversation but soon come to the end of his scantily recollected German. He had never been in Germany or spoken the language colloquially; and it was fully fifteen years ago that he had studied it for some very elementary examination. Since then he would lazily have accepted the statement that he “knew German,” but now, on such sudden demand, he found he could not remember equivalents for even the commonest words. And her own meagre English did nothing to help him out. But he did manage to ask why she hadn’t waited for him at the theatre, since she had sent for him there.

“I didn’t send for you,” she answered, in German. “It was the boy who sells chocolates. He sent for you. He said you were always so very kind.”

David was just as embarrassed as most men would be by such a remark.

She went on: “He called you ‘the little doctor’ — is that right? … ‘Der kleine doktor?’”

Which completed his embarrassment, for he was one of those people who can live a whole lifetime without seeing or hearing the most obvious thing about themselves. He had not really known that he was called “the little doctor” until that moment, and he did not quite know whether he liked it or not; and, anyhow, the disclosure left him shyly disconcerted. And beyond all that he was troubled, perhaps by the rescoring of ancient mind tracks that the translation effort had entailed. He kept smiling the more steadfastly because he had used up all his German, and into a silence, as he packed his bag to go, came a revelation of her own mute solitariness in suffering. This made him feel towards her as to all such sufferers — that nothing could ever ease the embrace of pain and its victim except a gentle blessing on that embrace; and such a blessing he gave, in secret, on her behalf.

“Good night,” he said, adding that he would call and see her again on Monday morning.

On the way back to his house it occurred to him that he did not even know her name. He stopped again at the shop window and glanced down at the playbill till he came to “Leni Arkadrevna, Whirlwind Danseuse from St. Petersburg.” Goodness, he thought; that must be the one!

On Monday, when he called, the girl had left. “She just went off yesterday morning, same as the theatricals always do of a Sunday.”