She was sleeping that night with her mother (in spite of many disadvantages it was still regarded as a treat among them to sleep with Mother) and had wakened suddenly at three in the morning with a familiar pang of misery at finding no bedfellow. Juley had not even got so far as to fall asleep at her prayers by the bedside. So Joanna arose, and shivering with fury and cold went barefoot down to the parlour. There, as she expected, she found her mother seated before her untidy roll-top desk with her head fallen on her papers. She had dropped asleep over a letter in the middle of an erasure, and she wore the old squirrel-lined cape in which she always ran out to catch the midnight “lifting” at the corner pillar.

When at last they were both upstairs, Joanna climbed back into bed, and, having exhausted herself in bitter reproach, lay wide awake and silent while her mother undressed. No matter how tired she felt, Juley was meticulous over her toilet. Always she had to dip her brush in the ewer so as to dampen the front part of her hair before plaiting it separately from the rest. Her creamy neck, covered at other times, and her raised, unconscious arms, so astonishingly soft and youthful, gave the watching child a deep thrill of pleasure. Soon the thin, sleek plait was ready to be tossed back, and Juley turned out the gas. Then did Joanna creep immediately into her mother’s arms, and in that warm, lovely encircling, her thin little body was flooded with well-being.

When they were both asleep, Joanna dreamed that a visitor was standing on the outside doorstep, ringing and ringing at the bell for admittance; but that she alone of all the house heard the summons. Going downstairs in her dream to open the door, she peeped first through the ground glass which formed its upper panel. Engraved on the glass was the head of a man with a curly beard, long believed by the children, for some inexplicable reason, to be a portrait of Satan; and by putting an eye level with Satan’s eye they were accustomed to spy through upon visitors. Joanna did this in her dream, and saw what froze her with horror. It was her father that stood without. He was unmistakable, though in some indefinable way horribly altered, and his presence filled her with repulsion. Father was dead. They had had a cable to say so, had mourned him, and he had no right to come back in this way. In terror, but under a kind of restraint, she opened the door one small inch. And that dreadful stranger who was yet her father tried to push his way into the house. But now hatred overcame every other feeling and, shutting the door with all her might, Joanna fled upstairs. As she went, all her determination was never to let the others know who had called.