Later, when all was done and she and Janet were drinking a last cup of tea in the stripped parlour, using the window-sill as a table, Mamie Boyd arrived.

“How fresh you do look!” she exclaimed as she kissed Joanna; “more as if you had been having a holiday than a flitting! But you must be feeling quite worn out all the same. I’ll wait with you as long as there’s anything to do. Mother says I’m not on any account to come home without you”

While Mamie entered into a long explanation of why she had not been able to turn up earlier, Joanna was in an unreasoning terror. Would the Boyds somehow coerce her into coming to them? The image was absurd but she could see herself being dragged by force past the door of the new house and over the bridge to High Kelvin Place.

By what excuses she managed presently to shake Mamie off she could never afterwards remember. She did it however without giving any definite promise, and almost pushed her too hospitable friend down the front steps. Soon afterwards Janet also departed, having made the feeblest of protests.

Left to herself Joanna went slowly from room to room of the empty house in a mute farewell. Here, under this roof she had spent her childhood and adolescence, and in leaving it she knew she was leaving her first youth behind. She had loved this home as well as hated it and was prepared for some emotion of melancholy on the occasion of departure. But no such sentiment would rise in her. Her spirit had already taken flight forward to a riper phase of life, and she was glad of it, and only glad. Without a single pang she took leave of the despoiled, sad walls.

At La France Quadrant, when the unloaded vans had driven off with the men asprawl and joking inside, Joanna was able at last to shut the door upon staring humanity which had all day been so interested in her and her belongings. It was a relief.

She sat down on a packing-case in the still crowded hall. The new electric wiring had not yet been connected, and in the dusk of the spring evening the round stone pillars on either side of her might have been tree-trunks. The confused shadows from the laburnum outside were thrown on the glass panel and fanlight of the front door. She listened intently. The house was utterly still, and from outside she could hear no sound but the faint, determined rushing of the stream far down where it passed by the flint mill. She was cut off now from the rest of the world, remote and alone, waiting in a dense forest: and she felt a little afraid.