“Just for a while.”

There came into the air a murmur that might have been anything or nothing till one realized what it was.

“Choir practice,” she said, answering his thought. “I have heard it before.”

“Do you often take a turn round here, then?”

“Take a turn? What is that?”

He put it into German for her, and then a curious line of her mouth, lit by the merging of twilight and lamplight, gave him an impression of mishap that made him add: “Is anything the matter?”

She answered, in German also: “Mrs. Newcome has told me I must go.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“Must go? But where?”

“Away.”

“But why — why on earth — should she say that?”

“She said she can’t afford to have me.”

“But that’s absurd. We can afford it perfectly well.”

“She said not.”

A silence fell on them both, and into it, making an interruption, came the voice of a passer-by: “G’night, doctor.”

“Good night,” answered David, not knowing, never knowing indeed, who the other was. Then he turned to Leni. “I really don’t understand it. I must see what Jessica has to say.”

Without the suggestion made or accepted they walked together down Shawgate, saying little else. Leni walked so quietly at his side, asking no questions that he could not answer, not bothering him, not making any fuss. Absurd to say one couldn’t afford such rare and priceless negations. Lamplight caught her face as she glanced sideways to cross streets, and he noticed, till it began to preoccupy him, the look of calmness that matched perfectly with her silence. Even her despair had held that same calmness. And suddenly he remembered the dressing room where she had tried to end her life, the Pier where they had walked that night, the already mounting total of their experience. Absurd that now, after so much, she should go. He must talk to Jessica as soon as he had the chance, though he realized, even in making that decision, how little he cared to ask Jessica anything. It wasn’t that he was really afraid of her, or that there was truth in Calderbury’s popular notion that she ruled him with a rod of iron. He wasn’t; she couldn’t. It was rather that his own will to do what he liked in his own house had been worn into a shrug of the shoulders that yielded, by nonchalance, all that could never have been claimed by force. Furthermore, Jessica was so efficient that it was easy to let her encroach to the very rampart of self-preservation; and that rampart, for David, was the door of the surgery.

Jessica was writing invitations when he found her later in the drawing-room. The engraved cards, filled in with handwritten names, lay spread out on the writing desk beside her — “Dr. and Mrs. Newcome request the pleasure of …”

“Jessie,” he began, breathlessly and without preamble. “What’s all this about getting rid of Leni?”

Jessica faced him with her thin, well-chiseled face, faced him also with her no-nonsense personality at full strength.