The little servant came in with the promised tea and made, as she set it upon the little table with the red and white check cover of remembered German cafés, bent over it in her short-skirted check dress and squab of sleek flaxen hair, a picture altogether German. She answered questions gravely, responsibility speaking even in the smile that shone from her plump toil-sheened young face, telling the story of how she and her like, permanently toiling, were the price of happiness for visitors. But this she did not know. She was happy. Liked being busy and smiling and being smiled at and shutting the door very carefully. Some movement of hers had set swinging an electric bulb hanging by a cord above the little table. Over the head of the bed there was another. Light and warmth in profusion—in a cheap room in a modest hotel. Switching on the light that concentrated on the table and its loaded little tray and transformed the room to a sitting-room, “I’m in Switzerland,” she said aloud to the flowered earthenware and bright nickel, and sat down to revel in freedom and renewal and at once got up again realising that hurry had gone from her days and flung off her blouse and found hot water set waiting on the washstand and was presently at the table in négligé and again ecstatically telling it her news. The familiar sound of tea pouring into a cup heightened the surrounding strangeness. In the stillness of the room it was like a voice announcing her installation, and immediately from downstairs there came as if in answer the sound of a piano, crisply and gently touched, seeming not so much to break the stillness as to reveal what lay within it. She set down her teapot and listened and for a moment could have believed that the theme was playing itself only in her mind, that it had come back to her because once again she was within the strange happiness of being abroad. Through all the years she had tried in vain to recall it, and now it came, to welcome her, piling joy on joy, setting its seal upon the days ahead and taking her back to her Germany where life had been lived to music that had flowed over its miseries and made its happinesses hardly to be borne.