She was already stepping out of the train, carrying a suitcase and a wicker basket.

“Leni!”

“Oh, du kleine doktor!”

They didn’t know what else to say to each other at first. There was the business of handing over the luggage, surrendering her ticket, passing the barrier with the small crowd from the train. People who knew David kept up a chorus of good-evenings. On the way down the steps to the street level he said: “Gerald’s looking forward to your arrival.”

Leni exclaimed in German: “I couldn’t believe I was really coming!”

“It was Jessie’s idea — I don’t know why I never thought of it myself.”

The porter, walking ahead, pricked up his ears. Afterwards he reported: “They didn’t talk much, but when the doctor said something she answered in some foreign lingo and ’e seemed to understand it all right from the way he smiled back at ’er …”

CHAPTER FOUR

LENI SETTLED DOWN AT the house in Shawgate and Gerald was happy. It was miraculous, the success she had in calming the boy’s nervousness and brightening his moods whenever they darkened; she could do it as well as David, and, of course, the trouble had always been that David had so little time for doing it. Now, instead of Jessica’s rigid discipline of scoldings and repetitions, Leni imposed her more elastic sway; and Jessica, freed from an irksome duty, seemed satisfied. David was satisfied too. After the first surprise of Leni’s presence he regarded it with sudden simplicity. It was his mission far more to mend what was wrong than to question what was right, and her position in his household soon appeared to him as unarguably right as a flower or the morning mail delivery. For just as he had a childlike inquisitiveness on the surface, so he was apt to seem incurious when he knew people better, not from any lack of interest, but because of his complete acceptance of them as they were. And if someone had suggested that there was anything odd in a German ex-stage dancer becoming his son’s governess, he would first of all have had to recollect that she was a German ex-stage dancer, and then have answered, with complete sincerity, that it was no odder than anything else. He wasn’t bothered, for instance, by any mystery there might be about her name and past; it did not seem to matter to him since he called her Leni and liked her. He called everyone by their first names.

Gradually her wrist became stronger and one afternoon, when Jessica was out, David heard her playing the piano. It was more from the surgical than the musical angle that he viewed this experiment; he wished to see how far the fracture had impaired her finger movements. To his considerable surprise she began to play rather well, and things he had never heard before; they weren’t his kind of music, anyway. Then he put in front of her a Mozart Sonata, thinking he might give himself the pleasure of hearing it; but she shook her head. “I can’t read it,” she told him.