“I believe I do, worse luck for me,” he had said at length, giving her a quick, troubled glance. “But you needn’t ask what I feel for you Joanna. You must know perfectly well.”

It was not the answer she hungered for, but she was thankful he had not simply replied with an impatient “Of course I do!” And there had been a ring of rueful truth in his “worse luck for me.”

But now she had found the door she wanted, a neat, moss-green door tucked away up three crooked steps in a corner. She knocked, waited, and at length heard the heavy, careful feet of a child coming down the stair inside. It must be a very steep stair thought she.

The next moment the door was cautiously opened and a very little boy, wearing a notably clean holland tunic, stood in the narrow aperture looking up at her.

Joanna looked down at him with eyes almost as grave as his own, and as she looked she hoped very much that he would like her. His curious seriousness, and indeed his whole small person was attractive to her. And this though there seemed to be something indefinably wrong with his proportions. He was not deformed, but his head looked too large for his rather dwindled limbs, a fault which was accentuated by the unusual thickness of his brown hair. And there was a look of premature intelligence in his grey, starry eyes, seldom to be seen in the eyes of a child who is not crippled.

“I saw the card in the window,” said Joanna. “Is anyone at home?” It took the little fellow a few moments to collect himself. He had a slight hesitation in speech, but the words when they came (saving that he could only pronounce th as v) were exquisitely enunciated.

“My Farver is out,” he said, “and my muwer is out. My sister and I are at home. Muwer said she would be back very soon indeed. She is just darting to the chemist’s.”

Joanna smiled. Perhaps, thought she, his mother is a bird! The child himself, with his small figure squeezed between the barely-opened door and the jamb, looked not unlike a nestling whose wings are still absurd where flight is concerned.

“Do you think I could come in and wait till Mother comes back?” she asked.

“I fink so, certainly,” was the boy’s well considered reply, and when he had spoken he widened the aperture where he stood and displayed a narrow, ladder-like stair covered with polished blue linoleum spotless as his tunic.

Joanna entered marvelling at his self-possession. He could not, she judged from his size, be more than six years old.

“I’m eight,” he replied, however, to her question on this point – “and my sister is twelve. But I am small for eight,” he added stoically, “and she is very long indeed for twelve.”