It was their mother. She leaned, in her thick, iron-grey dressing gown, over the bannister opposite her bedroom door, and was covering the top of her head with both her hands. By her voice they knew she was almost weeping.

“That isn’t Georgie!” she cried reproachfully. “No, Georgie, I won’t have you coming up yet. You are too early! Your train isn’t due yet by my watch, and I put it right last night. Now that you are here of course it can’t be helped: but you must wait till poor Mother puts her fichu on. You children don’t think!”

Having delivered herself Juley disappeared into her bedroom and shut the door behind her.

Georgie burst out laughing.

“There’s no place like home!” she averred delightedly. “Everything is always the same. Why do I expect it to be different each time I come back? But what was that Mother said about a fichu, Joanna?”

The younger sister explained. Juley’s hair had lately become very thin upon the top. It was difficult to dress, so she had taken to appearing at breakfast with a white net fichu draped over her head, and fastened with a brooch under her chin. Wearing this fichu (which not only concealed her defect in a becoming manner but postponed indefinitely the daily purgatory before the mirror) Juley had seen herself greeting Georgie in the lobby with outstretched arms, and she was utterly disappointed at the failure of her welcome.

“No, don’t come in!” she called out, though she was half laughing at herself now, as Georgie opened the bedroom door. But it was no use, and the next moment her warm arms were round her child.

Breakfast was happy and noisy, and Joanna, taking part, but always a little outside, thought that surely there had never been such a pleasant family party. She longed only for Sholto to join them. How entirely different from any other family they were! Was there not an atmosphere, a charm, impossible to explain? She loved most of all her mother’s puzzled face when any of them made a joke she could not follow.

The fichu was duly admired by Georgie.

“It makes you look foreign, Mother,” she said, “like a picture I have seen somewhere.” And she was right. The simple drapery, unspoiled by lace, accentuated the breadth of Juley’s abruptly sloping forehead, and with her rather prominent, worn eyelids and her eyes of sad, but unquenchable enthusiasm, she might well have been one of Dürer’s sacred women.

Then the dining-room door opened quietly and Sholto appeared. (Janet, the old cook, had run to let him in before he could ring the bell, and she stood behind him now, smiling proudly at them all.)

“Hul-lo, you people!” he exclaimed, in his jolly, rather slow, young man’s voice; and Joanna felt warm and shy all over. It was only a few months since they had seen him last, but the sister easily forgot while he was away that her little brother was a grown man now.