The voice was full of sympathetic wistfulness.
“I have a severe myopic astigmatism,” she announced, gathering up her music and feeling the words as little hammers on the newly seen, pallid, rounded face.
“Dear me ... I wonder whether the glasses are really necessary.... May I look at them?... I know something of eye-work.”
Miriam detached her tightly fitting pince-nez and having given them up stood with her music in hand anxiously watching. Half her vision gone with her glasses, she saw only a dim black-coated knowledge, near at hand, going perhaps to help her.
“You wear them always—for how long?
“Poor child, poor child, and you must have passed through all your schooling with those lame, lame eyes ... let me see the eyes ... turn a little to the light ... so.”
Standing near and large he scrutinised her vague gaze.
“And sensitive to light, too. You were vairy, vairy blonde, even more blonde than you are now, as a child, mademoiselle?”
“Na guten Tag, Herr Pastor.”
Fräulein Pfaff’s smiling voice sounded from the little door.