During supper a small lamp filled the room with deep shadow rather than with light, and in the glow of the charcoal fire Aurora, who cooked and waited on them, looked like a goddess. Joanna could hardly take her eyes from the servant’s neck, which rose a thick and golden column from the great shoulders; and when she turned from the stove to bring them a dish, she walked royally, swinging on her hips. While Aunt Perdy talked and talked, Joanna and Aurora kept smiling at one another with the warm and secret understanding of youth.

Still Joanna listened; for when Perdy was not speaking of herself, she spoke of the Erskine family; and on her lips the most trifling events assumed an epic quality. An old Dumfriesshire nurse of her childhood moved like a giantess amid her talk; an ancient Huguenot lady known as “Grandy,” with a title and a wonderful ebony wig, who had looked after Perdy and her sisters for some years after their mother’s death, stood out as another large and gracious figure; a dwarf who had run away from a travelling circus at Peebles to take refuge in the manse, and who had become the children’s ill-tempered but loving slave till his death a year later, gave a note of grotesqueness. But all these dim figures, which recalled to Joanna a hundred half-heard tales of home, were no more than the background in Aunt Perdy’s narrative to the stupendous figure of Papa. Papa was all and in all. And constantly Joanna found herself glancing up at the wall from which the ecstatic face of the old minister looked down at his daughter and his granddaughter.

It had been a grief to Robert Erskine that no son was born to him; for his son was to have been called Hildebrand after his hero, and he was to have been a great man. But with characteristic vigour this father of four daughters had put his dream behind him, and had thrown all his zeal into the education of his girls. After four of Shakespeare’s heroines he had named them – Miranda, Perdita, Juliet and Hermione – though at home they became known as Annie, Perdy, Juley and Minnie. And though Annie had died at twenty of a fever contracted during one of their educational trips in the Campagna, and Juley at seventeen was on the verge of a mental breakdown through over-study, his children’s faces still glowed when they spoke of him.