“All right.”

“He’s really been good?”

“Yes.”

“He can’t help it, you know, even when he isn’t. Wasn’t he frightened at all — by anything?”

“He didn’t like the big waves when we walked along the beach, but I made him laugh.”

“You did?”

“I said things in German. I said, ‘Hurtig mit Donnergepolter entrollte der tückische Marmor’ — and he began to laugh and then made me say it over and over again.”

David smiled eagerly. “You know, that’s just the way I do it too — anything to make him laugh, anything I can think of, when he gets into one of those panics. I believe that’s the only way to tackle them until he can tackle them himself.”

“Is it true that when he was younger he was run over by a train?”

“Good God, no! Did he say that? Oh, he’s an awful little story-teller — you mustn’t believe everything he says. He just imagines things, you know, and everything he imagines is more the truth to him than what really happens. That’s why he has these panics — through imagining things. He doesn’t really tell lies.”

“I know.”

“If you do know, you belong to a very small minority, I can tell you. And I think he must feel you do — that’s why you get on so well with him.”

He had been talking English and she German most of the time. They couldn’t either of them be sure that the other grasped an exact meaning; but David didn’t care. He had never found it possible to put everything he meant into speech; indeed, he had sometimes felt that words offered a merely surface exactness that was both an illusion and a danger. That was why he avoided scientific jargon, preferring to write on medical certificates “bad cold,” because he knew well enough that a bad cold might mean anything, and that a bad cold was in this respect rather like life. And so, listening to Leni’s German, which she no longer tried to simplify for him, he caught the mood rather than the detail, and felt no more eager to dispel an occasional word obscurity than Whistler must have wanted the mists to disappear before he would paint a sunset.

The following Friday he took Gerald to Sandmouth again. The repeated experiment was almost too successful, for the boy enjoyed himself so much that when the time came to return to Calderbury he burst into tears and refused to be comforted. That, clearly, was as big a danger as anything else; and David, promising that he should sec Leni again, was privately aware that it had better not happen. It would be disastrous if Gerald should develop some deep attachment that could not continue; and how could it, since the girl would soon recover and be at work again? At least he assumed so, and she assumed so too; for her money was coming to an end, and even if she could not dance again for some time (as she certainly could not), there might be some other temporary job to tide over the interval; they had talked over that possibility together, and he had been quite optimistic about her getting a commercial post requiring knowledge of German.