To her bright, unseeing gaze the room seemed full of people standing up. Actually there were only six, counting herself. She shook hands with the Lovatts and with Mrs. Plummer, a woman distressingly thin, with masses of untidy black hair and a green velvet dress. Then turning in obedience to a sign from her hostess, she became conscious of a strange man, blasé yet dapper, with a straw-coloured moustache and rather prominent hazel eyes. He was staring at her though the strong lenses of his glasses with the painter’s intentness. Indeed, but for that look, which she had sometimes seen in the eyes of Nilsson, Joanna would not have taken Louis Pender for an artist. Particularly by the side of Mr. Lovatt, the carpet manufacturer, with his stooping shoulders, velvet jacket and silky grey beard, his guest appeared a person entirely worldly. Of the three men present, he was the only one wearing a stiff shirt, and his dust-coloured hair was quite short and carefully brushed. It looked incongruous with the astonishing yellow moustache.

Yet in spite of this deference to convention there was something so resentful in the man’s whole presence that the friendliness of his hand-clasp came to Joanna as a surprise. She looked inquiringly, involuntarily, straight into his eyes, and while she saw how their colour was accentuated by fair lashes, she had the curious sensation that her heart was holding its breath. When he heard Joanna’s foreign name Pender’s lids lifted slightly with interest.

So engrossed was she that it was an effort to attend to what Mrs. Lovatt was saying. But presently Joanna understood that she was to accept Mr. Urquhart’s shyly proffered arm to the dining-room.

On the staircase she was so conscious of Pender who walked behind with Mrs. Lovatt, that she did not say a word to her companion. But on renewing the acquaintance it had surprised her to find how well she remembered him. This was the first time she had set eyes on him since the Italian class, from which she had not knowingly carried away any vivid impression of him: yet now his dark, silent face, and bashful body appeared almost intimately familiar.

At dinner he hesitated several times before achieving speech, and Joanna, instead of helping him, waited with indolent cruelty. She guessed at his shyness, but in her own hour of release showed no mercy. Besides she was watching Pender who sat opposite at the further corner of the table. There was a jauntiness in his movements which might have been taken for self-assertiveness. But somehow, Joanna knew better. Somehow, with a secret warmth of knowledge she saw him unsure, bitter, on the defensive.

“I only learned yesterday from Mrs. Lovatt that you were back in Glasgow.”