Joanna was glad to relieve her increasing feeling of tension by at once opening her travelling case, and unpacking the presents she had brought from Glasgow. There were several pounds of tea, on which Aunt Perdy pounced joyfully, and she fingered with critical approval the roll of good wearing stuff her sister had sent – rough grey tweed with a herring-bone pattern. She was pleased too with the half-dozen pairs of Balbriggan stockings and the stout moirette petticoat. But what took her fancy most of all was a pair of half-worn brown velvet slippers, with cross-straps and high heels, belonging to Joanna. Before Joanna could beg her to keep them, she had put them on instead of her zocolli, and even over the coarsely knitted socks they fitted her. In her delight she walked up and down the room, holding out her full skirts like a young girl and looking down with pleasure at her elegant feet.

“I can see you have not the Erskine Feet,” she said, glancing at Joanna’s, “though they are well enough shaped and not large. But look at mine. Though I am over fifty, they are as they were when I was seventeen. And see!”

Eagerly unfastening Joanna’s slippers, and standing on the rough boards in her scarlet stocking soles, Aunt Perdy sprang right on to the tips of her pretty toes like a ballerina, and stayed there poised for perhaps ten seconds, her arms outstretched and her fine serious face thrown back in triumph.

It was true. She had marvellous feet, small, and with strongly curved insteps. On coming into the house she had laid aside her mannish cap and the dolman, and Joanna thought she looked stranger than ever. Her light brown hair, in which were only a few threads of grey, was cut in a straight fringe starting far up on the crown and coming almost to her eyebrows. Her eyes could at any moment, and apparently at will, fill with fire; and in spite of its many fine wrinkles and the absence of colour from the cheeks, her face was indomitably youthful. Both face and neck were of an even, yellowish tint. Her breast was full and deep. Only in a careless sagging of the stomach and thickening of the hips did she show her age.

The next moment she was unrolling and measuring Juley’s tweed to make sure there was enough for a new winter dress. The amount hardly satisfied her, and she began to examine Joanna’s crape-edged skirt to see if it would do as a pattern.