At the unlooked-for mention of Urquhart’s name, Joanna turned her head in curiosity. Why should Louis, like Mildred Lovatt, insist that Lawrence was in love with her? And her brothers too! After Lawrence’s unremarkable call at Collessie Street two months before, since when she had not met him, they had teased her about him. But she herself was by no means certain. He was too persistently friendly. And lately, during his absence on the continent with Nilsson, her unsought friendship with him had taken on a new and more permanent aspect. Out of the joy of his heart Lawrence had written to her from Holland, from Switzerland, from Italy. And she had found herself rather to her own surprise responding with unaffected warmth and freedom. How well she could sympathize with the raptures of that first escape from the walls and the sounds and sights of home!

“Do you think,” Joanna asked Louis, still looking questioningly, at him – “Do you think that was he by the steps the other night?”

“I neither know, my dear child, nor do I care,” replied Louis. “But as this is the third time you have asked me that same question, I take it that you do care.”

No. Joanna protested that she didn’t care either. It was only that she was curious to know.

What had happened was this. While Joanna had stood waiting in the late afternoon near the granite steps of the park where Louis was to join her, she had noticed at some distance a figure very like Lawrence Urquhart’s also apparently waiting, and she had felt that her doings were watched. Then Louis had come and the figure had disappeared. Could it have been Lawrence? He was certainly due to be back in Glasgow, but she had not heard of his return.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” continued Louis. “You are a bad, dangerous woman, a devourer of men, Joanna. That’s what you are. With all your talk about love and ‘the other thing’ forsooth! And your delicate madonnaish airs! You simply want us all to be mad for you. That’s the long and the short of it. Now isn’t it?”

But he had quite forgotten Lawrence now; and as his tongue tripped on between his smiling lips, irresponsibly, Louis, with all his mind and body was really only waiting for the moment when Joanna would have to pass him again on her way from the window. When that moment came he clasped her waist, and Joanna responded, throwing her arms gladly round his neck.

“We are just a pair of innocent babes, you and I,” he declared, “infants – that’s what we are. You can take it from me. But the whole wretched world is a conspiracy to call us guilty. That’s all that’s wrong.”

“I should like to defy the world. I feel able,” said Joanna, with elation.