“I don’t expect anyone, anyhow,” said Joanna peacefully, and filling her brush with bright orange pigment, she proceeded to block in a nasturtium upon a blank side of Ollie’s box.

Mr. Moon, having gone obediently downstairs, returned the next minute, “Some one to see Mrs. Rasponi,” he informed them. “I’ve taken him up.” And he sat down again to his reading.

As Joanna in a little confusion laid aside her paints, murmuring the while that she wondered who on earth it could be, a gleam of pure malice flashed from Trissie’s eyes.

“It isn’t Mr. Pender,” she volunteered in a low, acrimonious voice. And she dug her trowel passionately into a tub of fresh mould. “It’s a young man … dark … seemed not to know his way.”

Like a fury she began tying up the long, helpless trails of her creepers with pieces of bast, tweaked viciously from a sheaf which she was holding between her compressed lips. But Joanna was too much absorbed in her own speculations to be more than dimly aware of the other woman’s malevolence. And she passed unscathed into the house.

II

As she entered the archway room, her visitor – it was Lawrence Urquhart – turned quickly from the window to meet her. He looked more self-possessed than she remembered him, and so well, that when they had shaken hands, for want of anything better to say, she remarked upon it.

He admitted that he was quite well. How was she?

Joanna was quite well too. But as she assured him of this, she did not meet his eyes; and when he admired her room, she set rather hastily about displaying her possessions. That was her Italian mirror: these her mauve and gold lustre tea-cups picked up at Dorking: here was her Empire coffee-pot, – wasn’t it a beauty? – and there by the window was the brass-clamped sea-chest she had got for a few shillings one wet day in an open-air market.

It was their first meeting since the last unhappy ride together more than a year ago, but in the interval Joanna had once accidentally had a glimpse of Lawrence unknown to him. It had been on a night when she was leaving a theatre with Louis. Lawrence with a friend – another young man – had been in the crowd, and the unexpected sight of his unconscious face had affected her so oddly that she had not pointed him out to Louis. Why was it, she had asked herself, that seeing Lawrence’s features anew after absence, was like being confronted suddenly by some vital memory of childhood? He was only an acquaintance of her adult years. Why then should his eyes recall so strongly the very look of the pools in the burn at Duntarvie?”