Emma had gathered up her music when the clothes were arranged, sighing and lamenting gently, "Wäre ich nur zu Hause"--how happy one was at home--her little voice filled with tears and her cheeks flushed, "haypie, haypie to home," she complained as she slid her music into its case, "where all so good, so nice, so beautiful," and they had gone, side by side, up the dark uncarpeted stone stairs leading from the basement to the hall. Half-way up, Emma had given Miriam a shy firm hug and then gone decorously up the remainder of the flight. The sense of that sudden little embrace recurred often to Miriam during the course of the first day. It was unlike any contact she had known--more motherly than her mother's. Neither of her sisters could have embraced her like that. She did not know that a human form could bring such a sense of warm nearness, that human contours could be eloquent--or anyone so sweetly daring. 2 That first evening at Waldstrasse there had been a performance that had completed the transformation of Miriam's English ideas of "music." She had caught the word "Vorspielen" being bandied about the long tea-table, and had gathered that there was to be an informal playing of "pieces" before Fräulein Pfaff. She welcomed the event. It relieved her from the burden of being in high focus--the relief had come as soon as she took her place at the gaslit table. No eye seemed to notice her. The English girls having sat out two meal-times with her, had ceased the hard-eyed observation which had made the long silence of the earlier repasts only less embarrassing than Fräulein's questions about England. The four Germans who had neither stared nor even appeared aware of her existence, talked cheerfully across the table in a general exchange that included tall Fräulein Pfaff smiling her horse-smile--Miriam provisionally called it--behind the tea-urn, as chairman. The six English-speaking girls, grouped as it were towards their chief, a dark-skinned, athletic looking Australian with hot, brown, slightly blood-shot eyes sitting as vice-president opposite Fräulein, joined occasionally, in solo and chorus, and Miriam noted with relief a unanimous atrocity of accent in their enviable fluency. Rapid _sotto voce_ commentary and half-suppressed wordless by-play located still more clearly the English quarter. Animation flowed and flowed. Miriam safely ignored, scarcely heeding, but warmed and almost happy, basked. She munched her black bread and butter, liberally smeared with the rich savoury paste of liver sausage, and drank her sweet weak tea and knew that she was very tired, sleepy and tired. She glanced, from her place next to Emma Bergmann and on Fräulein's left hand, down the table to where Mademoiselle sat next the Martins in similar relation to the vice-president. Mademoiselle, preceding her up through the quiet house carrying the jugs of hot water, had been her first impression on her arrival the previous night.