Miriam seemed to gaze long at a pallid, rounded man with smiling eyes. She saw a garden and fields, a firelit interior, a little woman smiling and busy and agreeable moving quickly about ... and Pastor Lahmann--presiding. It filled her with fury to be regarded as one of a world of little tame things to be summoned by little men to be well-willed wives. She must make him see that she did not even recognise such a thing as "a well-willed wife." She felt her gaze growing fixed and moved to withdraw it and herself. "Why do you wear glasses, mademoiselle?" 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. Pastor Lahmann stepped back. Miriam was pleased at the thought of being grouped with him in the eyes of Fräulein Pfaff. As she took her glasses from his outstretched hand she felt that Fräulein would recognise that they had established a kind of friendliness. She halted for a moment at the door, adjusting her glasses, amiably uncertain, feeling for something to say. Pastor Lahmann was standing in the middle of the room examining his nails. Fräulein, at the window, was twitching a curtain into place. She turned and drove Miriam from the room with speechless waiting eyes. The sunlight was streaming across the hall. It seemed gay and home-like. Pastor Lahmann had made her forget she was a governess. He had treated her as a girl. Fräulein's eyes had spoiled it. Fräulein was angry about it for some extraordinary reason. CHAPTER VII "Don't let her _do_ it, Miss Henderson." Fräulein Pfaff's words broke the silence accompanying the servant's progress from Gertrude whose soup-plate she had first seized, to Miriam more than half-way down the table.