Gladly the girl would have escaped; and not from her aunt’s rapture alone, but from the strong, terrifying response there was to that rapture in herself. She shrank from the deep exposure.

But as she could not escape, she held herself like stone, sitting there on the edge of the bed and staring at the herring bone tweed. And the elder woman found her stolid.

Neither silence nor interruption, however, could long stay the stream of Perdy’s speech; and it was still flowing steadily when later in the evening they sat downstairs eating their supper of artichokes fried among eggs in a great earthenware dish. Ordinary talk was impossible, and Joanna soon gave up the attempt. Perdy, even when she put a question, never allowed any one but herself to answer it. All she wanted was a listener. But so manifest was this need, that Joanna wondered how she ever managed to pass a day in solitude.

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.