Lawrence had spoken at last, and Joanna was caught by the pedantry of his phrasing. So shy he was, yet so precise! And she smiled at him, dazzling him with all the new joy in her heart.

“And I learn,” she replied, “that you are the coming anthropologist!” As she spoke, he saw her gay smile change into a regular schoolgirl grin which put everything else out of his head. Not till this moment had he known how keenly he had looked forward to meeting her again. He still remembered the pain of unreasoning anger and emptiness with which he had heard of her marriage and departure to Italy.

How was it that she had been back for three whole years without his having once seen her?

“Glasgow is a bigger place than one thinks after all,” was what he succeeded presently in saying.

But Joanna only smiled a vague assent, and he saw that he had lost her. She was listening, not to him but to the talk between Pender and Mrs. Lovatt. She had gathered that Mrs. Tullis, the Professor’s wife, was calling next day to meet Pender.

“As I shall stay down here until I know one way or the other,” Pender was saying, “I may as well do a portrait of her if she’ll sit to me. Yes, I was to have painted her two years ago, up in town. But Tullis got his Glasgow job and carried her off, so nothing came of it. It wasn’t a commission of course. She was a friend of my wife’s.”

Then he was married!

Rousing herself Joanna turned again to Lawrence.

“You are a friend of the Tullises?” she asked him. But Mrs. Lovatt cut gaily across his unready reply.

“Yes, Mr. Urquhart, you tell us! Do you think Mrs. Tullis so pretty?” she demanded to his consternation, dragging the young man into the open.

At Mildred’s question, Joanna looked instinctively at Pender’s face; and she saw embarrassment like a cloud pass over it, leaving it the next moment quite devoid of expression.

While Lawrence sought his answer, Mrs. Plummer spoke for him.

“I think she is really rather beautiful!” said she, with her overweighted head on one side, and as if she gained a reflected glory by praising the good looks of another woman. “There’s a something of the woods about her, don’t you think, that’s very lovely? Farouche, I think is the word.”

“For myself,” Mrs. Lovatt retorted, “I should rather have said vixenish than farouche, with that hair and those two little sharp white teeth in front. ‘Pretty Mrs. Fox,’ is my name for her. Come and meet her here to-morrow Joanna, and tell me if you don’t agree with me.”

“Mildred always was jealous of red-headed women,” whispered Mr. Lovatt in a stage aside to Joanna. And the others laughed and fell apart.