It was Juley that spoke.

Joanna, tormented by the vexation and pertinacity in her mother’s voice, looked up from her drawing-board and across the dark parlour. She was sitting close up to the window eagerly using the last of the daylight for her work; but Juley stood uncertainly by the door, grasping the knob with one hand, while with the other she contrived awkwardly to hold a small tray loaded with tea things.

To the daughter by the window the mother’s face in the interior was only a pale blur; but she knew its expression as surely as though she could see the distressed features. And her blood rose in irritated protest.

She was working. She was trying to finish a lunette-shaped design for to-morrow’s class at the School of Art. Why couldn’t her mother let her alone? It was all very well coupling her name thus with Linnet’s. But in practice Linnet was left unmolested, and went his queer, separate way alone. And it had been the same with Sholto till he had left home a year ago. It seemed as if the boys were exempt from their mother’s spiritual passion. She even did her best to forward them in the world, scraping together the money for Sholto to start fair in the colonies when he should be ready to go, and keeping unpunctual Linnet up to the mark in his attendance at Mr. Boyd’s law office, where he was now apprenticed.

But what she considered the unspiritual ambitions of her daughters she had never ceased to mourn, and as Georgie was away, it was Joanna who chiefly suffered the strain of being yearned over.

“I say it again, Joanna, my child,” continued Juley; and though she tried to put sternness into her tones they remained simply vexes: “To please Mrs. Lovatt, or Mr. Nilsson, or Phemie Pringle, or any of the new friends you have made since you came home, there is no trouble you will not take, and take gladly. But if poor mother asks you to do something for her sake, it always goes against the grain. How is it? You get lots of flattery, Joanna, outside your home, but I must speak the truth to you; and this that I have said, however it may grieve us both, is the truth. Think how little it is I am asking of you – simply to give one short hour of next Friday to read and pray quietly with a few of God’s dear good workers! And remember, my daughter, you will not have mother with you always. She is growing older, and her constant prayer is that she may not be spared to old age, to be a burden to herself and others.”