The woman remained perfectly still in the doorway. She was stiff with shyness and delight, and could move neither backward into the room nor forward into the corridor. The man’s physical nearness robbed her of initiative.

“Is there ever such a thing as a waltz at your Glasgow balls?” he asked with a touch of petulance that she liked. “I understand the next dance is a scot — scot —, something that sounds like catching cold.”

“A schottische?” Joanna laughed.

Up flew Pender’s eyebrows, and without any other perceptible change, every line in his face and body became expressive of comic despair.

“I ask you, do you see me dancing it?”

He had the comedian’s gift, and Joanna’s laughter rang out readily. Yet it was above all when he was clowning for her entertainment that she felt the underlying discord and distress of the man. Her heart seemed to drip sweetly with pity for him, like a full honey-comb. It was as if her blood told her that there was virtue in her for his healing, his lavish consolation.

“Come and sit it out with me,” he urged. “I’ve seen the very place for us downstairs. It’s so hot and noisy up here. I hate it.”

There were empty chairs on the landing, and Pender with Joanna on his arm hesitated a second before taking her downstairs. It was one of these little human waverings that are so pathetic on the eve of an already settled fate. There they stood poised, she in her gay dress, all billowing in the draught from the ball-room, her face turned like a flower, like a question, to the man’s, abiding his decision; he, refusing his answer, taking counsel alone, weighing his little world that he hated yet feared, between his palms, and gnawing anxiously at his petulant under-lip.

“I suppose at dances in London there are nothing but waltzes now?” Joanna asked, when they had got half-way downstairs. But she did not even notice that her question remained unanswered. She was all exultation in the surety that he too had been waiting for this. Had he not looked for a place apart where they could sit together and talk?

When he led her along a darkened passage on the ground floor, she guessed they were going to the Antique Class-room; but the room they entered was worlds removed from the familiar place in which she had worked through many an hour of daylight. Its known contours were all disfigured by moonlight, and by the straggling rays of a street lamp which came mixed with moonlight through the long plaster-coated windows. The statues lurked strangely in corners. The place was not illumined; its darkness was made manifest, and its unsuspected secrets of darkness.