“Good. That is settled.” Pender spoke evenly, but the excitement was mounting in him also. “As soon as I can get some sort of a studio rigged up, I’ll let you know,” – and though he had leaned back into the darkness again, Joanna could feel the unsheathed boldness of his eyes like weapons, there in the darkness like weapons ready to strike. And suddenly she remembered something of the hawk in his face – was it the eyes, the nose, or was it no matter of feature?

Two long ends of narrow, bright blue ribbon hung from Joanna’s waist to the floor on the side where Pender was; and when he had spoken she saw his hand go out and take hold of these. She saw his hand slip gleaming, snake-like, through the discovering ray, passing swiftly from dark to dark, and though it was only her ribbon he touched, a quiver passed through her whole frame.

“You are going to paint Mrs. Tullis too?” Against her will Joanna asked this, but she must hear his voice when he spoke of this other woman.

Pender stopped his winding up of the ribbon, which had seemed as if lessening the distance between them, and answered rather stiffly:

“I may, if she has time to sit.” Then he went on with his winding, gathering a larger and larger spool of the silk girdle between his finger and thumb.

“You like her?”

Under Joanna’s persistence he moved abruptly, but with what meaning she could not tell.

“She’s a very charming woman – or was –” he said, and he flicked the spool of ribbon from him so that it lay split again on the floor. “I’ve not seen her for some time. But don’t you know her?”

“No. You say you like her?” Joanna hated herself, but could not refrain.

For this last minute they had talked in strained, unhappy voices, but Pender broke the tension between them with a little laugh.

“I couldn’t say till I see her again whether I like her or not,” he said, speaking now quite naturally. “I once liked her very much indeed; but one never knows how one will feel after six months, let alone two years and more. Don’t you find it so?”

So he had told her! And though Joanna was taken aback by what she rightly felt to be the directness of his reply, she understood and was grateful. This man, she realized, had his loves, like the Italians of whom Mario and Maddalena had been used to speak casually. He was of those who took unfaithfulness in marriage as a matter of course. And there flickered again in the girl’s mind, like a single phrase from a melody but once heard, the remembrance of that little, secret door, set deep in the wall of La Porziuncola.