At the moment, her head on one side, and only the absorbed curve of her lips showing beneath the drooping brim of her hat, she was making a birthday present for Ollie Garland. Some days before, she had black-lacquered a small wooden work-box, and now that the surface had hardened, she was painting a bright, impossible bird on the lid and little gay-coloured flowers on the sides.

“I do hope Ollie will like it!” she exclaimed happily, not speaking to anyone in particular.

“What sort of a bird is it supposed to be?” asked Trissie Moon, lifting her heated face and pushing back a fallen loop of her hair with her forearm. In the other earthy hand she clutched a trowel, and had been working this last hour at her nasturtiums with penal energy.

When Trissie was gardening one had to wonder what it was that she was so fiercely punishing in herself, or for what it was in another that she thus made expiation. Or was it merely some spite against life which she was confusedly wreaking upon the earth? Her eyes, with the bruised shadows beneath them, were burning. Her pallid forehead glistened with sweat. Her mouth was set in lines of pain.

She was the only one on the roof-garden not at peace. Mr. Moon sat reading on a canvas chair. Edvina was asleep in her carriage, with a dark parasol stuck through the wicker work to keep the glare of the sky from her upturned face. And Roddy, squatting on the leads, was placidly involved in a net-work of railway lines.

Joanna gave a little laugh in reply to Trissie’s peremptory demand.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I’m making it up as I go. I thought a phoenix perhaps?”

Edwin Moon looked over his spectacles and his British Medical Journal at the box in question.

“I don’t think it’s a phoenix. No,” he observed unemphatically. And in the colourless tone of your true scholar, he proceeded to describe that mythological bird.

Joanna gave him an interested glance. Rarely would her landlord himself initiate any learned conversation. But while others talked loosely of this or that, it was astonishing how often apt or curious information was furnished in his mild voice.

“What about a bird of paradise, then?” asked Joanna. “I think I’d like it to be a bird of paradise.”

Mr. Moon seemed to give this his approval.

“And the less like the real thing the better,” he suggested with the ghost of a twinkle in his quenched blue eyes.

“You know of course,” he went on, “that there is a legendary bird of paradise as well as the one they kill for women’s hats? Give little Ollie the myth.”

But Joanna knew nothing of the legend.