Joanna asked him his name. It was Rodney Bannister Moon, he told her, which she thought a very nice, pretty name. And his sister – what was she called?

“She’s called Miss Moon,” said he.

The visitor, feeling a rebuke in the perfect, bright gravity of this reply, asked no more questions. But as her host stumped manfully on his short legs up the stairs in front of her, he volunteered some further, and as it were pleasanter information.

“She’s an invalid,” he announced with great cheerfulness. “Would you like to see her? She’s been moving her head so nicely to-day, and when she opens her mouf I’m allowed to put a little sugar in. Just a weeny, teeny grain of course, or else it might choke her.”

A door on the landing above stood open, and Joanna as she followed the boy wondering, had a glimpse of the little sitting-room to which he was leading her. It was a room (saving that the rug before the fireplace was littered with fine, curiously shaped pieces of metal) tidy to a scrupulous degree. And more than tidy indeed. For there were Dürer prints, hung with discrimination upon the plain, lavender walls, and an old diamond-paned bookcase stood opposite to the door, and in a corner, also visible from the staircase, was a Heppelwhite music-stand with a violin-case beside it.

But once she had entered Joanna saw only a single object, and it was none of these. It was a thing that lay flat on its back in a wicker spinal carriage near the window. It was an unhappiness from which, when one perceived it, it seemed wrong not to avert one’s eyes. Yet one had to look. So this was Miss Moon!

Joanna looked, and looked again. She was thankful to have seen, with time for recovering herself, before the mother’s arrival. And she was steadied by the unconcern of Miss Moon’s brother.

“She had a fit this morning,” he was saying, making polite conversation from where he was squatted on the rug, and without looking up from his interrupted work of piecing together the parts of a meccano. “When she has a fit, white stuff comes out of her mouf. But my Farver says it isn’t the sugar really. My Farver says it is froff, like what a horse gets on its bit sometimes. You see” – he explained, summing up – “she’s afflicted, that’s what it is.”