“Don’t worry about me, Mother,” she exclaimed fractiously above the rattle of the old Singer. “If you’d only get to bed yourself it would please Sholto and Georgie far better than anything else you could do. You know it would. But of course you’ll go on sitting up and distressing us all. It’s different for me. I can sit up for once. I don’t want to be machining when they are here. I can finish the button-holes and things while we are talking, but I must do the stitching now. It won’t take much longer.”

The last few words were uttered almost in a shout, as the girl set tearing off again like mad upon a long trouser seam; and the night was filled with the racket.

For a moment Juley stood irresolute in the doorway. Then knowing by experience that Joanna’s obstinacy matched her own, she went back sadly and without another word to her writing. She was still fully-dressed though heavy-eyed and weary. For hours she had been struggling against sleep at her desk, in the forlorn hope that, contrary to all knowledge, she might thus get clear and have a mind at leisure for her son on the morrow.

But within ten minutes she re-appeared in the parlour with a happier face. She had brought some eatables upon a little tray. These she set down on the edge of the machine table, smiling ingratiatingly at Joanna. And Joanna looked up and smiled too and stopped working. The night became at once blessedly quiet. There were two glasses of milk, some gingerbread, a few raisins on a saucer, and a small tin box containing a special kind of flaked chocolate which Juley always kept in a corner of her desk.

Mother and daughter ate almost in silence, but happy together now with a delicious, secret communion and acknowledgment.

Even so, Juley (in most things generous) could not help being stingy towards Joanna over the raisins and the chocolate. They were always kept apart for herself alone and were sacred to her desk and her midnight labours.

In the morning Georgie’s train arrived so punctually and she took such an unusually fast cab, that she was home almost half an hour before they had counted on seeing her.

Joanna, in her chemise when she heard the sound of wheels, and with her hair still in a dishevelled plait, flew downstairs without sparing the time even to throw on a dressing-gown. On the landing, half-way, she ran into Linnet.