As the mother caressed her child’s head with one hand (he ducking away from her impatiently) she took off her hat with the other, pressing her wrist against her brow a moment as if to placate a permanent ache there. And Joanna saw then how superficial had been that first impression of youthfulness.

Mrs. Moon’s face with its small, almost infantine features, had been cruelly used by trouble and the years. Under the greyish skin there was a bruised look – the dull yellow and purplish marks of irreparable fatigue; and the tiny ruptured blood-vessels of effort beyond recovery, alone gave other colour to her cheeks. Her eyes were strangely dilated, still more strangely smiling, as if to deny with their final glance that her life was as a cord perilously stretched – near, ever so near to breaking point. On she talked with a rattling inconsequent gaiety of Mr. Knaggs the chemist, of Roddy, of Edwin (whom she took for granted Joanna knew to be Mr. Moon and no other), of summer holidays in the long past, in the highly debateable future.

Very soon her listener had to abandon any attempt at following the ins and outs of a tale, for the understanding of which an essential was some familiarity with the people and events so freely referred to by the teller. Instead she used her energy to fight down the sensation she had of watching a sleep-walker who strayed along the precarious edge of a cliff. In time, however, by putting in a question now and then she did gather that the rooms of her quest were empty through the perfidy of somebody or other. Edwin, the unpractical, declared Mrs. Moon with a wild little laugh, had only lately abandoned his notion of turning the one upstairs into a music-room, the one over the archway into —

At this point, Joanna overjoyed, succeeded in making an interruption. Was the room over the archway then really one of the two that were to be let? And if so, might she see it?

Full at once of apologies, Mrs. Moon showed her the rooms in question and wanted to conduct her all over the house.

But a glimpse was enough.