“I do wish, Mother, you wouldn’t tell every one where we are going,” objected Georgie the moment the door was closed again. “People only laugh at us. That man was laughing. I saw him. What’s the use of telling him that Grandpapa came out at the Disruption? He’s probably a U.P. anyhow.”

“Dear, dear, how sensitive you children are,” replied Juley undisturbed. She was annoyingly accustomed to such rebukes, and feeling suddenly hungry she opened a small paper bag and began to eat from it with relish. She had thriftily saved half a buttered roll from their hasty breakfast.

“What if he did smile, Georgie?” she went on between bites. “It will do him good to smile, and us no harm.”

Georgie blew an irritated breath, and settling herself with a wriggle in the corner where the umbrella had been, she resolutely opened the book she had brought with her. It was Sartor Resartus. She did not understand it, but it exhilarated her with a sense of superiority to the rest of the family. She glanced scornfully across at her sister who was reading Tit-Bits, indulging an inferior appetite for mere bits of curious information.

The train had moved out of the station, but just then it slowed down and stopped on the high bridge which there spans the Clyde. Joanna, from learning how many times a sovereign beat finely out would engirdle the earth, looked up and out of the window. Below her, framed in the great transverse shanks of the iron grille, the water looked so beautiful that she could have called out. Yet something kept her quite still and mute in her corner.

It had been raining half an hour before, but now the sun gleamed on the brown surface of the river and on the wet, grey granite balustrades of the Jamaica Bridge. The bright red and yellow horse-cars flashed as they followed each other northwards and southwards along shining rails, and the passing craft on the water moved in a dun-coloured glory. By one bank some paddle steamers were being re-painted for the coming season. Joanna with the others had often sailed in them for summer cruises, and she knew by the number of funnels and their colours to which line each boat belonged. She knew the dredgers too, obstinate in mid-stream, with their travelling lines of buckets trawling glittering filth from the river-bed, while passing them, a string of half-submerged barges and rafts hung behind a little panting tug. Less familiar was a giant liner that made her slow way seaward. Her decks were deserted. Only a negro leaned, gazing, upon a rail astern.