But nine months passed: nine months, including Christmas and Easter holidays spent as usual by Joanna in Scotland; and Juley seemed no nearer to the carrying out of her decision. Whether there was anything in the various practical excuses for delay periodically alleged by Juley in further letters and talks; whether she did not as yet, after all, feel perfectly sure of Heavenly guidance; or whether she was simply not equal to the uprooting, Joanna did not know. At intervals she continued to urge her mother’s coming, but now that the summer holiday was again at hand, and nothing in the situation changed, she had begun once more to accept her freedom as a permanent condition.

Neither had Louis afforded her any further, or at least any definite occasion of testing, such as she had prepared herself for on that November evening. On the morning after his daughter-in-law’s unexpected arrival he had set aside all family claims, and had gone with Joanna down into Surrey for a long blissful day’s walking. They had climbed up, down and about Leith Hill, and had discovered a solitary inn, with a wide triangular common to itself. And Louis had been at once more winning and more serious with her than ever before. Since then she had perfectly accommodated herself – or so she thought – to the inevitable difficulties of their situation. She had anyhow grown used to them; and against them in the balance she could place a steady progress in her work. This much was certain – under the combined discipline and excitement of her life her technical accomplishment increased.

It was a brazen, stifling Sunday afternoon in August, the day before Bank Holiday. Louis had left town the morning before. Joanna did not start for Glasgow until the Tuesday morning. As usual, with London bereft of her lover, she found a blankness in the air. Everything seemed empty and echoing. But it was not wholly unpleasant. She liked to miss him. They had parted firmly, almost happily. Her mind was already set forward upon her holiday, badly needed, and beyond her holiday upon the next coming together. Moreover, without any doubt there was a sense of relief in the knowledge that she was free, to herself alone, for that day and the next: that she could come and go from the house without any fear of missing some call or telephone message from Louis. While he was in town, it was a fear that never quite left her.

In spirit, therefore Joanna inhabited a kind of limbo to which she had long since become accustomed on these thresholds of holiday. But in the flesh, this afternoon at three o’clock, she sat with the Moons on their roof-garden.