The cottage consisted of two rooms – an upper and a lower – separated by a flooring of pine which was unplastered below, and so roughly joined that there were gaps large enough to slip a finger through. The lower room was paved with square red tiles, and barely furnished with a deal table, a painted wooden bookcase, three cheap chairs, and a shabby but fine old armchair of woven cane – the only one with cushions. Some white enamel cups and saucers mixed with common stoneware stood along the shelves of a fixed dresser on one wall; and the whole of another wall was filled by the fireplace, which gave dignity to everything with its huge sloping hood of stone.

Joanna, glancing at the bookcase when she was for a moment alone, saw Burns’s Poems. The Pilgrim’s Progress Looking Backward, A Romance of Two Worlds, and The Schonberg, Cotta Family. There were also several works by Pulsford, Harris, and Laurence Oliphant, some more novels by Miss Corelli, and some by Ouida. In all, there were not more than two dozen books.

On the walls hung a number of old-fashioned daguerreotypes as well as one or two photographs made vulgar by enlargement. In one of these Joanna recognized at once the gentle, fanatic countenance of her Erskine grandfather, whose same adored portrait hung over her mother’s bed at home. And above this Aunt Perdy had nailed a reproduction of Holman Hunt’s “Light of the World,” the only coloured picture in the room.

She had pointed to this the moment they entered the cottage.

“You see, I will have no imaginative pictures on my walls, except one,” she said “and that Jesus. All the others are photographs of the men who have made Aunt Perdy what she is. There you see your darling grandpapa, my good angel who comes often from Heaven to commune with me in this lonely spot, and to tell me what are the words I must say to poor humanity as it struggles in the mire of ignorance. Over there is dear Pulsford. You know his Morgen Rothe? What! You have never read it? Poor child, you have not yet begun to live. And here, here is my beloved Laurence Oliphant – my appointed soul’s mate, as I have come to believe during this last fortnight, after much prayer and meditation.”

But the photograph which most interested Joanna was a faded cabinet one which had been nailed up in an inconspicuous corner by the bookcase. It was so like Gerald that for a moment she took it for his picture. But on looking closer she saw that this young man had little whiskers and an old-fashioned collar. Then she knew it for a likeness of Gerald’s father, her Uncle Henry, a vague figure of whom her mother seldom spoke. He was dead, Joanna knew; and she was dimly aware that for years before his death he and Aunt Perdy had lived apart.