“ … Because I ran away,” she added suddenly.

“From home?”

“No — from school … It was very strict and I hated it. The Russian frontier was quite close, so I ran away one night and went to St. Petersburg, to the dance school there, but the police found out about me, so I had to run away again. I hid myself on a ship in the docks and came to London. So you see I must stay in England now — I cannot go back to Germany. They would arrest me there — because of the forgery.”

“Forgery? Why, what was that?”

“On the passport when I went to Russia. You have to have a passport. I altered all the writing on the certificate — about my name and age. I just made up a name.”

He began to smile. “But it wasn’t done with any criminal intent. I don’t suppose you’d find the authorities very hard on you. They wouldn’t send you to prison.”

“Not to the prison, maybe, but back to the school.”

He laughed. “Oh really, no — they couldn’t do that. At your age you’ve a perfect right —”

“No, no, that’s just it — because on the passport I said I was twenty-five.”

“And aren’t you?”

“I’m nineteen.”

David looked at her. He had never really wondered about her age, but now he realized that he. was astonished. Nineteen! It didn’t, of course, make any difference to the way he would treat her. He never condescended to youth, never behaved as if seniority gave him superiority. There was a sense in which he treated grown-ups as if they were children; but in the same sense he also treated children as if they were grown-ups. And there was this same childlike gravity in the readiness with which he believed people, because he knew he knew so little about the nature of truth, except that it could be very strange indeed.

“You won’t tell anyone, will you? Not even the police — if they come to ask about me?”

He touched her reddish hair, thinking it now a child’s. “I wouldn’t worry at all if I were you.”

“No, I do not worry now. Because you do not worry, either. You never ask me about anything and that was why I have told you everything.”

In the lives of most Calderbury citizens there was little that one might count the days to, either in fear or in anticipation. Months flowed by in a stream of busy uneventfulness, varied by occasions that arrived almost before one realized they were due: Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, the summer holidays; market day, Sunday, the monthly diocesan gazette, quarterly payments, the annual fair. From the bishop’s to the butcher’s, Calderbury lives were signposted thus, and years drove past without a gear change. Only the schoolboy crossing off dates to the end of term, or the old-age pensioner in fear of next winter’s chills, could taste the cruel beauty that time offers to those who are bound to count its fragments.