In silence Joanna perched on a high stool, and her companion pulled forward a small throne on castors, and sat upon it between her and the windows which all ran along one wall. Colour could not persist in this underworld, and Joanna’s head and shoulders and breast, rising from her dress, might have been of marble but for the living shadows. Pender’s face was in deep shade. She could only see the glint of his glasses, and his lightly clasped hands, caught by a shaft of light from the street as he leaned forward, elbows on knees. The music of the schottische came to them from far above, not as melody, but as a monotonous pulse of sound. They were together, hidden, remote, in a forsaken world revolving in melancholy but beautiful twilight.

“What a thing light is!” exclaimed Pender in low struck tones. “As I see you now, I shouldn’t know you for the same woman I saw ten minutes ago, dancing.”

Joanna, in a reel, had seemed to him, for all her slightness of figure, like a young heifer in a clover field, essentially sturdy, full of unbroken, untouched vigour; and the combination of this with her face which he found over-refined in features, had inflamed him to a degree astonishing to himself. Now she was suddenly aloof as a moon-maiden, and his passion recoiled into himself. But he was surer than before of her attraction for him, – surer rather of the special quality of the attraction.

“Yes, everything is different,” she agreed, her voice also quiet with wonder. “I am only beginning to see you now. It’s so queer, isn’t it, how every bit of colour is washed out? I can never help thinking that colour is really form, though I suppose we know it isn’t.”

The speech pleased Pender.

“Who really knows what colour is?” he said. “But I believe I get that feeling at times —.” His grave, interested voice was charming to Joanna; and suddenly he leaned further forward, looking up at her, his face coming into the shaft of light, his eyes no longer appraising.

“Will you sit for me some day?” he asked, with such boyish, shy directness, that it was like taking off a mask or throwing open a door for her to enter.

“I’d like to,” Joanna replied in simple delight: but even as she spoke her simplicity gave way to excitement, and she became rigid with it as she had been in the doorway upstairs.