Really – as often happens with a certain kind of solitary exhilaration when it is transferred from a vague to a definite setting – a peculiar reaction had taken place. Joanna herself was not immediately aware of it. She merely condemned the exhibits as astonishingly tame, and turned instead to look at the people. Very likely, she told herself, she might see some one she knew; and with a little unacknowledged sinking of her heart she admitted it would be pleasant at the moment to have company.

All at once, as if some stony word had been uttered in her ear, her body became tense. She had seen Louis enter the room. And with him was his wife. Joanna had never seen his wife before, but she could not be mistaken. That smiling woman swathed in smoke grey for whom he had held open the door, was she. Joanna knew it, though now, as she saw, there were two other women with him. A tall old man and a young man followed.

The party, self-absorbed and moving leisurely, proceeded through the first room. Clearly the object of their visit did not lie here. And now Joanna was conscious only of disappointment. Louis had not seen her! How she had prayed while awful things were happening in her breast, her throat, her limbs, that he would not see her. But now he was almost at the further door, and she could not bear it. Her feet carried her rapidly up the long, crowded room after him.

There they were, in the next room now. She stood in the doorway, looking. Why, of course it was the Mortlake tiles they had come to see! Some dozen of them were showing in that case … rare old Persian ones … “a sight more worth while than most pictures!” Louis had said of them once, cocking up his eyebrows in sincerest admiration … And that tall, old man was Sir John Mortlake … Had she not a drawing of his leonine head at home on the back of a receipt?

It was a small room, and as the Pender party had just met more friends, they seemed to fill it up. Louis was introducing some one to the smoke-grey woman. His voice and manner seemed to imply that the gallery existed for him and his friends.

“You know my wife? …”

Each time his voice sounded shutters of darkness kept descending across Joanna’s line of vision. But it was as if in addition to her ordinary sight she possessed some microscopic inner eye which was exempt from emotion; and with this she continued to register facts.

That young man, it said, was not Francis, his father’s favourite: that was Oliver, the soldier son. And the pretty fair girl was his wife, Marietta.

Yet, when it came to Mrs. Pender, the tinily working mechanism would only chronicle a dress. Nothing but a dress! A very beautiful dress it was … remarkable even among the many unusual toilettes surrounding it … other women had to turn and look at it with admiration … But what of the face above these subtle folds and draperies?