Joanna who had sat down in a little rocking-chair, looked again at the stricken one by the window, and she looked this time differently. The boy’s way of regarding his sister as a wonderful sort of live doll had curiously cleared and altered her vision. Her first horror was gone, and looking simply, a child herself for the moment, she saw that the still face was beautiful. The close-cropped skull, its sharp temples so transparent and blue-veined, was shaped for splendour, and noble brows guarded the vacant, long-lashed eyes. In the piteous mouth alone was any trace of suffering visible. The clear eyes and forehead, the dilated nostrils, fragile as porcelain, had no recollection of the pain by which they had been purged into what they were. Miss Moon was like some sea-shell, delicately empty, cast high upon the beach, which it has taken the whole cruel ocean to blow into shape, to flute and carve and lave to a foam-like whiteness. Her long – surprisingly long – body (could it be that she was only twelve?) was covered by a Jaeger rug, and no movement showed anywhere saving when the tapering, filigree fingers twitched, tinily convulsive, on the woolly, fawn-coloured stuff.

At the sound of a latch-key downstairs, Joanna rose instinctively from the rocking-chair. At being found here like this she felt somehow guilty.

“That’s my Muwer,” quoth Rodney undisturbed in his playing – if the word “play” could be applied to anything so intent as his occupation. And the next moment his mother entered.

At first in the rather dim light of the room – for a thunder-storm was gathering outside and the sky had darkened within the last ten minutes to a threatening degree – Joanna took Trissie Moon to be a woman little older than herself, that is to say some years under thirty. She was noticeably neat in figure, girlishly quick in movement, and her face with its dusky hair looped curtain-wise over the ears, seemed very youthful in the shadow of a mushroom-shaped hat.

“Have you been waiting some time? I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed with an exaggerated, slightly jarring brightness. (She was your hostess apologizing for lateness to an invited guest.) “That Knaggs man, you know, will talk and talk. All I wanted was to get Roddie’s bottle re-filled; but he would ask about Edwin, and were we going away at all this summer though we couldn’t go last, nor for that matter the summer before. For he has a brother-in-law, he says, who could give us very moderate rooms at Dymchurch, a man called Stabb who plays the ’cello: and he thought Edwin and this man Stabb, if only they could find a third, might get up some trios of an evening. It would certainly please Edwin. I’ll tell him about it to-night. But I doubt if it could be managed. – And all this time you have been waiting!” she broke off – “Well, I hope Sonny has done the honours.”