“You have come,” said he. “I had almost given you up.”

While she explained her mistake and he blamed himself, neither listening to the other’s words, they turned towards the now setting sun and with the strong glow of it full in their faces began to walk downhill.

Until the first breathlessness of their meeting had subsided they could only make superficial conversation. Louis pointed out to his companion that with the sun so low now in the sky, all the colour in the world lay behind them to the East, and he had to make her turn round several times before he could convince her. But really, while they argued with vehement lightness, each was groping under every tone and movement and all the flurry of sensual excitement for the truth of the other.

The region through which they were now walking was for Joanna full of childish memories, which in a curious way added to her excitement. They had passed the dark Synagogue with its dome, the Salvation Army Shelter, which had once been a little farm-house and still stood in its blackened garden, and the smart new Cancer Hospital built of garish, red stone. And on the other side ran fine, dismal, old family dwellings with porticoes and high, square-paned windows which now sheltered obscure mantle-makers, cheap teachers of elocution, and theatrical landladies. It was one of these houses which had been old Horatio Bannerman’s manse in the early days.

But Louis looked about him with a little shudder of distaste.

“How very depressing all this is!” he said.

When Joanna could not help championing it, he looked at her with a warm amused smile, which faded however when she asked him rather timidly about his own childhood.

“I can’t remember,” he replied emptily. “It’s queer how little I can remember. I don’t think it particularly interested me being a child.”

That Joanna could not understand.

“I remember everything – everything!” she told him, wondering.

“Well, for one thing you aren’t so far from your childhood as I am,” Louis replied, speaking in a certain light tone which gave his companion a peculiar sense of unhappiness. “That makes a difference, you know. Wait till you are my age.”

“No, no! I’ll remember till I’m dead.” It was almost as if she warded off a blow.

“Not the disagreeable things, surely? Or were you always happy as a child?” he asked, looking at her. He was not interested in their talk, nor in what she was about to say: but he liked to see her face thus serious. She looked now, he thought, like an early Gothic Madonna, rather faultily carved perhaps, but with inspiration.

“No, I wasn’t.” Joanna looked at him in return. “But I like to remember, even the unhappy things. They seem part of it all, part of me. I couldn’t bear to forget. It would be like losing bits of myself.”