“How long can we talk for?”

“Oh well … no exact time limit, y’know … pretty well as long as you like within reason. Say half an hour. Plenty of time for anything you want to say to each other. We shan’t bother you.”

“You mean there’ll be nobody listening?”

“Maybe we’ll stretch a point and call the warders off … I daresay you’d like it better in private. Oh, and by the way …”

“Yes?”

“You remember at the trial — right at the end — you told the judge that the girl was really only nineteen —”

“Yes. But he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“I know. I’m interested, all the same, in what you said. Did you only just say it to try to get her off?”

“No, it was true.”

“But how did you know it was true? What reason had you for thinking her so young?”

“She told me.”

“Oh, I see … You hadn’t any evidence except just that?’^?

“I believed her.”

“Yes, of course … Ah well, you’ll see her this afternoon.”

And a few minutes later, recovering from his embarrassment, Millman telephoned to the Governor of Midchester Prison. “Yes, I told him it would be private. Did you tell her the same? Good … rather an awkward business, really … Oh Lord, no, he was so damn pleased about it — thought I’d fixed it as a special favor, y’know. Rather pathetic, in a way … made me feel a bit of a … oh yes, I asked him about the girl’s age, but he knew nothing definite — only that she’d told him she was only nineteen. Seems to have believed everything she told him, poor devil … Yes, all right — three o’clock. We’ve fixed the room and the men will be ready …”

At five to three the little doctor was taken along corridors to a room he had never seen before, a small match-boarded room in which were a table and two chairs. He sat down on one of the chairs and a warder took the other. Then at a few minutes after the hour another warder made some signal from the door, at which the first warder got up and left the room. For a few seconds David was alone; then the door opened, and Leni, also alone, entered.

They had let her come in ordinary clothes, the same that she had worn whilst balancing on the back of David’s bicycle along the Marsland Road. But her face was different from then; she had the little crushed smile that he had seen first of all when he had bandaged her wrist after the accident at the Theatre Royal. She came forward, stumbling a little, leaning at last into his arms as he stood. “Du kleine doktor … Oh, du kleine doktor …” She began to cry, and all at once it seemed to him that the whole world was crying, crying for lost, impossible love.

Her first words were: “David, whatever you did, I love you, David. I told you that once before, but you took no notice.”