Since his return to Glasgow Louis Pender and Joanna had met frequently. They had met at Panmure Crescent; she had come with Mildred to see the Carmunnock studio where he was now living; the Plummers had brought her to the City Chambers to look at the scaffolding and other preparations for his work there. But each of these meetings had been in the company of others. Not since the night of the dance had the two spoken alone together for more than a few scanty seconds; and not till the day before this May afternoon had Louis found an opportunity to suggest the kind of meeting for which he was now waiting. It had been in obedience to circumstance the merest tentative suggestion of an appointment on his part, and without ratification on hers, so as he stood there on the hill he was agitated by a pleasant, boyish nervousness. Experience, however, bade him hope, as also did his shrewd reading of Joanna’s character. He had lost no time in learning her story from Mildred, and judged rightly that she had reckless blood.

But would she come? It was not in Pender’s nature to be fatuous in these matters, and he held, in spite of a fair share of conquests, a really low estimate of his own attractiveness. When six o’clock struck, and there was no sign of the young woman for whose appearance he owned to a surprising hunger, he mildly cursed himself for a middle-aged fool. Another quarter of an hour he would wait, he decided, and no longer. And with a superstitious notion that his too eager looking might foil its own end, he turned his back on the direction from which the nymph might most reasonably be expected to come.

At least, thought he then – being forty-seven and having survived many excitements and disappointments – he might enjoy the extraordinary, mounting beauty of the evening about him. Perhaps after all it was only in cities of the North that one got such a voluptuous contrast and harmony as now presented itself to his gaze? Above the stony, clear austerity of the town curved the sky. It curved, holding its fill of light, ebullient, like a bubble of serenest blue; and forming that bubble’s tumultuous outer rim were the piled-up, yellow flamboyant clouds whose huge tops seemed on a level with Pender’s admiring eyes.