From the big day-nursery windows on the top storey which commanded wide, grey views to the south and west, the girls could remember watching the distant ascent of their first fireworks – rockets soaring in honour of Glasgow’s earliest Exhibition. From the same windows they had seen with rapture the first lighting of the city by electricity. And three times they had hung out great flags over the sills for Royal Processions. Once Georgie was quite certain that Queen Victoria driving up Sauchiehall Street, had waved her hand in special acknowledgement to their high window.

Within the house, as one entered, the first thing to meet the eye was a richly illuminated scroll bearing the words –

AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE SHALL SERVE
the lord.

It had been Sholto’s first act on returning from his wedding-trip to hang this text. And Juley often looked at it now, remembering vividly how her bridegroom had stood on a chair to nail it in its trumpery frame full between the marbled pillars of the lobby so that nobody could miss it. He had laughed and had kissed her afterwards. And the sight of it in these, the early days of widowhood, always filled her with resolution.

But as time went on it began to be evident that Sholto’s widow and his children were variously disposing themselves to serve the Lord in ways which Sholto himself would have dealt with summarily had he been alive. More and more Juley’s resolution when she looked at the house-text became linked with a stricken conscience: more and more she saw that to play the double part of father and mother was not going to be so easy as at first she had imagined.

“I wonder,” said Joanna tentatively one night as she and Georgie were getting into bed – “I wonder what Father would say if he knew you missed out ‘for Jesus’ sake’ in your prayers now?”

But Georgie was ready for such questions.

“Father isn’t the same now as he was,” she told her sister. “He understands everything now, and knows just what I feel about God and all that.”

II

It was at this time, within a year of her father’s death that Joanna had a dream about him.