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By Root 2074 0

face that perpetually wept, two painted tears on her wooden cheek—first, because she had no child, and then, because her child was uncanny. A few days later he put on the old play, with Wolfgang as his assistant. This play was not silent—the two men spoke all the parts, and Wolfgang played a tripping tune on a primitive bagpipe. They all came—Joachim and Karl, Toby and Griselda, Leon and Dorothy. Dorothy had noticed that the artist was quietly disappointed if she was not at every performance in the Spiegelgarten. Light glistened on the half-hedgehog’s lively spines. She thought, I shall never pass my matriculation, if I spend all my time in here, watching dolls dance. And yet, as the hedgehog came blackly out of the thorns, like a butterfly out of a chrysalis, and was washed white so he could bed his princess, she was moved to tears, she felt liquid inside, she was pulled about like tides by the moon. She had not bargained for all this.

Wolfgang, a few days later, caught at Griselda’s sleeve as she was leaving the lunch table in the Pension Susskind.

“A word with you—” he said, in English. “Some quiet place,” he said.

Griselda felt his fingers electric. She had been aware that he watched her—her skin was warmer in his searching stare. He was both a mocking and a serious young man. He made wry jokes about Bavarians and beer, about the Kaiser and his wardrobes full of uniforms, about King Edward in England, his harem of ladies, and the Boers suffering stolidly in South Africa. He was at home in this strange new world of satire, skits, innuendo and sudden plangent sentiment. He watched her, Griselda. When he saw she saw him watching, he curled his wide mouth in a deprecatory grin, and looked away.

She followed him out into the garden, and they sat at a table, under a vine sprawling over an arbour.

“I want you to see this,” he said.

He handed her a large sketch-book. It was filled with drawings of female heads, very occasionally with bodies attached to them, seen from every angle, with every possible expression. They were done in charcoal, in pencil, in chalk, in ink.

They were herself and Dorothy. They studied their bones, their hair, their attitudes, their habits of mind.

For a moment, Griselda thought Wolfgang had done them. Then he said

“What have you done to my father? He is verzaubert—bewitched. Is he in love with you? People have been speaking—to me and my mother. He has never been like this, never. Have you made him mad?”

Griselda stared at him in horror.

“It isn’t that, at all. Not at all.” She thought furiously. “I think you must ask him.”

“How can I? He is my father. He has always been—rather serious, a little distant. How can I ask him if he is in love with one or two English girls? People have said—spiteful—things to my mother.”

He looked gloomily at the table.

“We want you to let him go,” he said, slowly.

“I only translate—”

“So it is the other, the Dorothy—”

Furies flapped in Griselda’s head. The secret was not hers. She said “There is a secret. It is not mine to tell you.”

“What have you done?”

“Listen,” said Griselda. “It is their secret. If I tell you, it will only be so as to stop you—thinking wrong things. It is a secret.”

“So?”

“She is his daughter. She came to tell him she had found that out. He—he believes her, you can see. They—they are—you see how they are. I only translate,” she was compelled to add, though she was covertly studying the repeated recording of her thin and pale beauty in the sketch-book. She said

“And you are her brother. Half-brother.”

Wolfgang put his head to one side and considered Griselda. She said “I think you should tell him you know. I think—” I think it is all too intense, she wanted to say, and could not. Wolfgang said

“I am glad you are not my sister.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Griselda flushed and looked away.

“Will you come with me, to him—?” said Wolfgang.

Anselm Stern, confronted by his son, his sketch-book and a deprecatory Griselda, was briefly taken aback. He had been controlling a story, and one of the actors had taken the strings into his