nto the soft brown eyes and
tried to think of something to say.

"My grandfather was a gentleman-fanner."

"Ah--that does not surprise me--but what a very English expression!"

"Is it?"

"Well, it sounds so to us. We Swiss are very democratic."

"I think I'm a radical."

Pastor Lahmann lifted his chin and laughed softly.

"You are a vairy ambitious young lady."

"Yes."

Pastor Lahmann laughed again.

"I, too, am ambitious. I have a good Swiss ambition."

Miriam smiled into the mild face.

"You have a beautiful English provairb which expresses my ambition."

Miriam looked, eagerly listening, into the brown eyes that came round to
meet hers, smiling:

"A little land, well-tilled, A little wife, well-willed, Are great
riches."

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."

Fraulein Pfaff's smiling voice sounded from the little door.

Pastor Lahmann stepped back.

Miriam was pleased at the thought of being grouped wi