“Na—Miss Henderson?”
It was Fräulein’s voice from within the little room. Minna was holding the door open.
15
At the end of twenty minutes, dismissed by Fräulein with a smiling recommendation to go and practise in the saal, Miriam had run upstairs for her music.
“It’s all right. I’m all right. I shall be able to do it,” she said to herself as she ran. The ordeal was past. She was, she had learned, to talk English with the German girls, at table, during walks, whenever she found herself with them, excepting on Saturdays and Sundays—and she was to read with the four—for an hour, three times a week. There had been no mention of grammar or study in any sense she understood.
She had had a moment of tremor when Fräulein had said in her slow clear English, “I leave you to your pupils, Miss Henderson,” and with that had gone out and shut the door. The moment she had dreaded had come. This was Germany. There was no escape. Her desperate eyes caught sight of a solid-looking volume on the table, bound in brilliant blue cloth. She got it into her shaking hands. It was “Misunderstood.” She felt she could have shouted in her relief. A treatise on the Morse code would not have surprised her. She had heard that such things were studied at school abroad and that German children knew the names and, worse than that, the meaning of the names of the streets in the city of London. But this book that she and Harriett had banished and wanted to burn in their early teens together with “Sandford and Merton.” ...
“You are reading ‘Misunderstood’?” she faltered, glancing at the four politely waiting girls.
It was Minna who answered her in her husky, eager voice.
“D’ja, d’ja,” she responded, “na, ich meine, yace, yace we read—so sweet and beautiful book—not?”
“Oh,” said Miriam, “yes ...” and then eagerly, “you all like it, do you?”