A month ago he would not have believed it possible to find himself so charmed in this dismal hole of a place called Glasgow. But neither would he a month ago have credited himself with any interest in a woman so strong as he now felt. It had surprised him during his stay in London that Joanna’s image had persisted. Perhaps it had still more surprised him on his return to find no waning in her appeal. It was odd, he mused, that he should run across this girl just when he fancied himself done with amorous interludes. Odd, too, that she should be so different in type from the women he had gone after hitherto. He had always admired short-featured women with square jaws, and strongly marked cheek-bones, women who carried their own shadows about with them. And here was one who was at the mercy of every variation of light. He was not even sure that he admired her. She certainly troubled him.

But anyhow, confound her, she wasn’t coming! It was a quarter-past six. He was tired of studying the buoyant outlines of those yellow clouds. He would wait only five minutes more. A woman came punctually to a first appointment or not at all.

And while Louis waited there, a stone’s throw from the Bannermans’ house, Joanna had been looking despairingly for him at the far end of the hill, low down and out of sight, some hundred yards away.

It was her nature to think that she must always be the one who had the more trouble to take, the longer way to travel; so she had stayed there a full ten minutes before it struck her that he might possibly have meant the corner nearest her home. “The corner of Dunbar Street,” he had said ambiguously.

Now she became certain that he had been at the other corner all the while and that she would find him gone.

She ran all the way up the long hill. She had no hope.

But there he was! There on the topmost point of the grey stone ridge. He was standing with his back to her, still as a stone man against the sky. Only the ends of his loose tweed coat flapped a little in the air.

The instant she saw him Joanna stopped running. She must recover her breath. So she went on at a walking pace, and it was an astonishment to her that she was still able to advance, to place one foot regularly before another on the granite setts of the hill. For the sight of him there, waiting with such patience for her so long after the time appointed, had a violent effect upon her knees.

Then before she had walked a dozen more steps towards him Louis turned his head and saw her, and the next moment they had met. They looked into each other’s eyes with a first swift searching, as their hands clasped firmly.