“Oh, come! That’s morbid, I consider. I prefer to be like the sundial and ’reckon none but sunny hours,’ or whatever the exact words may be. Anything unhappy or dull or painful I make haste to forget. I assure you it is an excellent habit.”

Joanna shook her head. All that he had said was hurtful, full of death to her, but it was impossible for her to explain either to him or to herself why it was so.

“I’m not like that,” was all she could say. She spoke, however, with a stoutness that was pleasing to him. He was curiously moved by this woman’s egoism, grateful for her absurd seriousness.

“Then we are different, you and I,” he said gently, and he smiled full at her, charming her suddenly, winning her with what she felt to be a rare tenderness.

“But,” he went on, in a different voice and with a light in his eyes that was purely predatory, “I’ll tell you something I shall never forget to my dying day. And that is the first moment I set eyes on you that evening at the Lovatts.”

Joanna, in bliss, remained silent.

“Neither shall I forget,” Louis resumed, “seeing you dance the reel up at the School. These, you see, are the kind of things I remember and want to remember. Do you know what I was doing up on the hill there while I was waiting for you!”

“No.”

“Try to guess.”

“Perhaps remembering other times you had waited for a woman?” she said.

Louis laughed with enjoyment.

“No, Mrs. Clever, and I wasn’t. I was trying to draw the lines of your face from memory against the sky as if it were a canvas.”

Again Joanna had nothing to say.

“If you don’t like me to tell you such things, Signora Rasponi,” he continued, “mind you tell me to stop.”

He had got her to look at him again, and again she spoke with that stoutness of hers that so pleased and tickled him.

“I like it,” she said.

Louis was really amused by her, refreshed, and at the same time he could not quite make her out.

When they had got to the bottom of the steep hill and were walking on the level, still westwards, he began to talk to her about his work.

“I ought to be ashamed of myself,” – he spoke with impatience, almost disgust – “at being so pleased over this twopenny-halfpenny commission. Why, by this time of day, people ought to be begging and praying me all over the place to paint their walls. But they don’t, you know! And here am I, as bucked as if I were a pavement artist at being rather reluctantly asked to add my daub to the other daubs in that ghastly, chocolate-coloured building you Glasgow people are so proud of. You’ll admit, I hope, that it is a beastly pile.”