Joanna crimsoned and put down her glass untouched. Neither her mother’s kind, grieved glance nor the message of sympathy sent across the table from Georgie’s eyes could salve her wound. Though a murderous hatred of her aunt rose in her, she unhesitatingly condemned herself. She had not known any better than to drink water before food, and now she sat disgraced before them all – particularly before Cousin Irene, for whom that very morning at breakfast she had conceived a violent admiration. Oh! why were she and her family not in keeping with the elegance around them? Why were they not cool and at ease at the luncheon table as Cousin Irene was? Joanna and Georgie had long ago agreed that Cousin Irene was a “softie” and a snob. But at this moment Joanna with her craving for exquisiteness was passionately envious of Irene’s endowments. She felt ashamed, not only of herself but of the others. She looked across at her mother who was encouraging Sholto to finish his soup by blowing upon each spoonful; at Linnet who lounged back in his chair; at Georgie who was being so careful with her tablespoon. And there was Mabel smiling hatefully, with her eyes on her plate. Joanna reminded herself desperately that the Erskines, on one side at least, were of a far more distinguished history than either the Bannermans or the Balmains. But this consideration only added the sting of unfairness to her present sense of inferiority. And she suffered.

VI

Three days later came the news of their father’s death from pneumonia.

They were all five sitting in Aunt Georgina’s little morning-room, the only room in the house where the children felt at ease. The boys were on the floor making a paper fire-balloon; and Joanna, with the book of directions open in front of her, was at a table cutting out and glueing together the more delicate parts for her brothers. They were very happy and busy amid a litter of tissue paper. But Georgie, sitting by the window, would insist on discussing the verbal inspiration of the Bible, a subject mentioned that morning in the Assembly. And Juley had laid down her Asias’s Millions, the better to refute her daughter’s argument.

“It says in Genesis, Mother, that Adam and Eve were the first man and woman; now, doesn’t it?” demanded Georgie.

“Yes, dear,” Juley, admitted, but doubtfully, suspecting a trap.

“Yet,” pursued the girl with increasing truculence, “when Cain was sent to wander about after killing Abel, he got married and had children. Now who could marry him, if he only had brothers and sisters? There couldn’t even have been cousins!”

“Besides,” put in Joanna as she neatly blew out a section of the balloon on which the glue had dried, “it says that God told people not to kill Cain. What people can these have been?”

“You must admit it looks a bit fishy. Mother,” wound up Georgie.