But back on his bicycle he forgot Mrs. Nickle and only thought of the fluid spreading and thickening in strained lungs, the word “bronchial” that had killed just as another word might have saved, the chatter of women over garden fences, recommending doctors as they might tip horses … Stupid, pathetic, suffering world.

By the time he returned to the house the party had had the refreshment interval and were on with music again. He let himself in by the surgery entrance. Passing through the waiting room, he caught the sound of strings; then, as he opened the surgery door, the sound swelled into sudden harmony, and also, at the same moment, he saw Leni in the leather armchair.

She looked so still and calm, so much a part of all that he sought beyond the fret of existence, that he caught his breath at both the sight and the sound; and all at once he realized something that he had long been experiencing without notice — an unclenching of every nerve whenever he came into her presence, a secret renewal of strength to take up every stress when he was left alone.

“Was it anything serious, David?”

“Not only serious but hopeless, I’m sorry to say.”

(A way they often had, and a way that no one else had ever had with him, to begin talking without preliminaries, as if speech were suddenly switched on to a conversation that had been taking place for a long time, but silently.)

“I am sorry too.”

He put down his hat and bag and sat in the swivel desk chair and was soon absorbed. Something in music rarely failed to lure him with a promise. He was no facile optimist, and nothing of his secret belief could be expressed in any outward allegiance to party or creed; he had no wild faith in progress, even in his own craft. But the patience and patterning of a string quartet offered him the strongest hint of destiny in man — and destiny without deans. It was not that he was irreligious — merely that a whiff of anticlerical-ism flavored his musings when he had a house full of Cathedral dignitaries. He was really happier by himself in the surgery, and “by himself” did not conflict with the presence of Leni. So why join the crowd just yet?

“I ought to have been playing in that quartet,” he said, when it was over. “But listen —” Fred Garton was beginning to sing. He had a good voice and a musicianly intelligence. “I don’t think I ever heard that song before.”

“It is a song by Schubert called ‘Die Krähe.’ From the Winterreise.”

“Krähe? What’s that?”

“I don’t know what you call it. A bird — black — disastrous — I can’t think of the word.”

“Never mind … Leni, I’m sorry you’re going.”

“Six … more … days …”

“And four of them I’m away at a conference. It’s too bad. I shall miss you.”