Phemie laid down a silk-fringed hand-bag decorated with beads, settled herself in a chair that was rather too high for her short legs, and started fanning her bright cheeks with a sheet of drawing-paper. Her smallest movement was full of festivity.

“Yon’s an awful-like stair of yours for a poor thing like me with a weak heart!” She spoke to Nilsson, but her smile was for Joanna. She sought the other girl’s sympathy, not for her inane remark, but for all the gaiety there was in life; so that Joanna had to smile back in admission.

And although during tea Phemie said nothing more ambitious than this, yet Joanna quite lost the first impression of silliness. Phemie’s eyes were too clear of self-absorption for silliness, and her silences were too intent. When any one else spoke she was poised in almost embarrassing attention.

Nilsson asked her if she would sing for them.

“I want you to try my new Steinway,” he said. And he told how he had bought the piano at an auction sale in Renfield Street for five pounds.

“Is that a fact?” exclaimed Phemie, with a colloquial exaggeration that showed how impressed she was. “Yon was a fair bargain!”

She had risen quite readily on being asked to sing, and she took off her hat as she spoke, stabbing the pins into it carelessly and throwing it on a chair before she crossed to the piano.

It stood in the far corner of the studio – an out-of-date table-grand, really cumbersome, with its thick body and carved, straddling legs; and seated before it, Phemie looked very little and dainty. Now that her over-trimmed hat was off, she showed a delicate head with hair parted smoothly and coiled behind. The light, which came through a yellow blind beyond the piano, seemed to take pleasure in enveloping her.

She struck some chords, gently giving the worn instrument its chance, her listening face turning the while sideways towards the window. It was a beautiful movement of her long neck and sloping shoulders, a quite unconscious disengaging of herself from the others, so that she became aloof in her circle of yellow light – she and the huge, old black piano.

Then her breast rose, her throat swelled like a bird’s and there came quite softly like a fine-drawn thread of gold, the first high, sweet note of her song.

Nilsson lay back sighing in his chair, his eyes closed, and a look of utter contentment on his face. But Joanna leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her eyes on the singer, thirsty for each lovely, careful note.

This girl, whom half an hour earlier she had summed up as common and silly, was an artist, no less! What a mistake she had made! Now she was eager to accept her humiliation. And above all, if only it might be, she longed to make Euphemia Pringle her friend.