“I had my eye on you,” he said, winking at Joanna in the odd way that Mildred Lovatt declared was so offensive. “Yes, since the first week I came to your damned School of Plumbers. ‘She is nice – worth while,’ I said to myself, ‘but all shut away; and so heavy and dull’ – what you call it? – lady-like – and, oh, my Lord God, so sentimental! No aplomb, no dash, no poise – a formless lump of femaleness – impossible! In that female amoeba there might possibly be a potential woman; again possibly not.’ Your Britain is full of the not possibles. ‘She had better get a lover, quick march,’ I thought, ‘or I give nothing for her chances.’ But I confess to you now: I did not see how you were to get the lover. I watched you. Then, hey presto! I hear one day you are married! But I was pleased! And to a foreigner, too! Better and better! And off to Italy in such a hurry! That’s the style! Yes, I rubbed my hands when I heard. ‘She is saved!’ I said.”

“Am I saved?” asked Joanna, with her broad, half-malicious smile. She might have been listening to a story about some one else, except that her heart felt like a fruit ripening on a south wall when the sun is strong.

“Not quite, perhaps. But one feels a beginning has been made. And now, Madame Joanna, if you would turn the head just a little – Na! Too much! I said a little – to the left. So, is good. For one moment, till the kettle shall boil for our tea.”

She sat quite still for him, keeping her head in the position he wanted, and sunning herself in his talk. There was something so genuine in the man that his interest was very sweet. It was good that he should think her worth while.

But Joanna’s too self-satisfied reverie was interrupted by the noise of quick steps in the passage which led from the street to the studio. Both quick, they were, and heavy-sounding like the steps of a child. And next moment the flap of the letter-box was vigorously rattled, and a high, gladsome voice called “Coo-ee!” through the slit.

Nilsson threw aside his pencil, and a smile of extraordinary pleasure spread over his ruddy face. He was a short man, beginning to get stout, and though the hair on his head was all gone grey, his beard and moustache still held the colour of bright rust. To Joanna at this moment he looked suddenly boyish.

“Now you shall meet my Phemie!” he exclaimed with delight. “She is the pearl of Glasgow. How glad I am that you should meet her!”

As he skipped across to the door, Joanna’s heart contracted in a spasm of mortification. What a fool she had been to imagine Nilsson especially interested in herself!