“Oh, I say.”
“Hah! Spree, eh? Happy thought of Lily’s to bring us here.”
Miriam pondered, distressed. “You must tell me which it is if we see him.”
Their party was taking possession of a long table near by. Returning to her voluble talk, Gertrude steered Miriam towards them.
As they settled round the table under the quiet trees the first part of the waltz movement of Weber’s “Invitation” sounded out through the upper window. The brilliant tuneless passages bounding singly up the piano, flowing down entwined, were shaped by an iron rhythm.
Everyone stirred. Smiles broke. Fräulein lifted her head until her chin was high, smiled slowly until the fullest width was reached and made a little chiding sound in her throat.
Pastor Lahmann laughed with raised eyebrows. “Ah! la valse ... les étudiants.”
The window was empty. The assault settled into a gently-leaping, heavily-thudding waltz.
As the waiter finished clattering down a circle of cups and saucers in front of Fräulein, the unseen iron hands dropped tenderly into the central melody of the waltz. The notes no longer bounded and leaped but went dreaming along in an even slow swinging movement.
It seemed to Miriam that the sound of a far-off sea was in them, and the wind and the movement of distant trees and the shedding and pouring of far-away moonlight. One by one, delicately and quietly the young men’s voices dropped in, and the sea and the wind and the trees and the pouring moonlight came near.