This picture, cut into sections and made brilliant by the interposing trellis of black metal, appealed not so much to the little girl’s untrained eye, as symbolically through her eye to her heart which leapt in response. The sunshine on that outgoing vessel and the great, glistening current of brown water filled her with painful yet exquisite longings. She did not know what ailed her, nor what she desired. She got no further than thinking that she would like to be a stewardess when she grew up.

With a warning cry and a long shudder the train, which had only stopped for a moment, started again. But before it had passed over the bridge, Georgie too, glancing up from her reading at the disturbance, caught sight of the river.

“O, look! Just look! Look at the river, all of you!” she shouted, rushing across the carriage. “Mother! Joanna! Isn’t it simply lovely? Isn’t it exquisite?” And in her enthusiasm she dragged her mother to the window at which her sister was seated. “Only look there!”

Juley leaned to look back at the retreating vision. She had laid her hand on Joanna’s shoulder, partly to steady herself, partly in affection.

“Yes, dears, beautiful!” she agreed with warmth. “God has put us into a beautiful world. Let us try and make our own lives to match it!” And after a pause she quoted words which had risen in her mind at the sight: “They go down to the sea in ships, and see His wonders in the mighty deep.”

Joanna felt miserably inclined to shake off her mother’s touch which had increased to a meaning pressure on her shoulder. It seemed to violate her, and she guessed with hatred at the pleased, ready tears in her mother’s eyes. Even while her own tears pricked painfully behind her eye-balls at the beauty of her mother’s words, she threw up frantic defences against their bid for her sympathy. Not for the world would she have yielded, not for the world could she have told why. The familiar, absurd thought came to her that she was perhaps a changeling or foster-child in the Bannerman family, no real relation to any of them. How else explain this trouble, this obstinate aloofness that was so common with her?