There was one other teacher, a Swiss and some sort of minister she supposed as everyone called him the Herr Pastor. She wondered whether he was in any sense the spiritual adviser of the school and regarded him with provisional suspicion. She had seen him once, sitting short and very black and white at the head of the schoolroom table. His black beard and dark eyes as he sat with his back to the window made his face gleam like a mask. He had spoken very rapidly as he told the girls the life-story of some poet. 7 The time that was not taken up by the masters and the regular succession of rich and savoury meals--wastefully plentiful they seemed to Miriam--was filled in by Fräulein Pfaff with occupations devised apparently from hour to hour. On a master's morning the girls collected in the schoolroom one by one as they finished their bed-making and dusting. On other days the time immediately after breakfast was full of uncertainty and surmise. Judging from the interchange between the four first-floor bedrooms whose doors were always open during this bustling interval, Miriam, listening apprehensively as she did her share of work on the top floor, gathered that the lack of any planned programme was a standing annoyance to the English girls. Millie, still imperfectly acclimatised, carrying out her duties in a large bibbed apron, was plaintive about it in her conscientious German nearly every morning. The Martins, when the sense of Fräulein as providence was strong upon them made their beds vindictively, rapping out sarcasms to be alternately mocked and giggled at by Jimmie who was generally heard, as the gusts subsided, dispensing the comforting assurance that it wouldn't last for ever. Miriam once heard even Judy grumbling to herself in a mumbling undertone as she carried the lower landing's collective "wäsche" upstairs to the back attic to await the quarterly waschfrau. The German side of the landing was uncritical. On free mornings the Germans had one preoccupation. It was generally betrayed by Emma in a loud excited whisper, aimed across the landing: "Gehen wir zu Kreipe? Do we go to Kreipe's?" "Kreipe, Kreipe," Minna and Clara would chorus devoutly from their respective rooms. Gertrude on these occasions always had an air of knowledge and would sometimes prophesy. To what extent Fräulein did confide in the girl and how much was due to her experience of the elder woman's habit of mind Miriam could never determine. But her prophecies were always fulfilled.