She blamed her father. But amid the heat and misery of her indictment, Sholto’s face, so long vanished from earth, rose cold and sweet and patient before his daughter, and he refuted the charge. It was long years since she had shut the door against him in her dreams. Now it seemed as if he had been waiting and waiting there outside for her mature reproach. And was not this patience of his, his everlasting vindication? Oh, the patience – the heart-breaking, awful patience of the dead! Oh, that face with its sweet, sunshiny smile, and its eyes so puzzled and afraid, yet innocent, like the eyes of a child! Had not he also, he asked her, been denied fulfilment? If Juley’s soul through him had suffered a tragic negation, what of his own extreme, irremediable pathos of incapacity?

Weeping, Joanna turned on her face upon the bed. And weeping she forgave her father and begged his forgiveness.

Next day she tried to discover her trouble to Georgie. She was almost speechless with shyness; but as they were sitting alone together at Duntarvie, drinking cups of chocolate before starting for town to buy young Sholto’s “shortenings,” she managed to put into poor words some part of her midnight thoughts.

The sisters in their black dresses sat facing each other across a small table in the green and white morning-room. Georgie, lolling back a little in her chair, showed all the pride of young and fruitful womanhood. Her eyes were absorbed and manger-worshipping, her face ruddy with health, her breasts large and sweet with milk. Joanna, as she rather painfully spoke, leaned forward – her elbows on the table and the tips of her fingers pressed against her temples as if the pulse there needed protection. And though she still looked very girlish, she was white-faced and harassed, with a faint shadow under each cheek-bone, and between her eyes the same sad, vertical line of perplexity which had been there at the time of Mario’s death.