Would he stay? Joanna asked him shyly. Would he sit down a while? Would talking be any use? But he shook his head, so she went downstairs to the door with him.

The yard was spouting with rain, and rivulets of rain coursed under the archway. As Lawrence and she clasped hands Joanna loved the sound of it.

“Endings have to be gone through by each one alone,” said he, “but I doubt if ever a true beginning was solitary.” And with that he was gone into the dark, slanting curtain of the rain.

As she went slowly back to her room, she dared hardly believe in the virgin jet of promise that bubbled tinily, limpidly up through her own nothingness.

CHAPTER FIVE

I

“I told you,” persevered the voice of Irene’s holiday governess, “that some seeds, and some fruits too, have wings. Can either of you tell me the name of a tree that has a winged fruit? Come, Carola! You try! The rain might go off if you would stop looking at it …”

At one end of the long, country drawing-room she sat with her two little girl pupils, filling in the slow half hour before tea with a Nature talk. At the other end Irene was having an argument with Aunt Georgina. And the murmur of the children at their lesson made a kind of droning counterpoint for the more acrimonious voices of their mother and grandmother.

“This is just a fad of yours, Irene,” declared the elder speaker inclemently, “about the children needing sea-air in August. I never heard such rubbish. Compared with these hills the sea is a nasty bilious place.”

It was now two years since the widowed Lady Westermuir had left Edinburgh and come to live at the small Perthshire estate from which her husband had taken his judicial title: and in this June afternoon (the very same afternoon upon which her niece Joanna was speeding South on the first wind of chance) she was seated by a window that looked out upon the Grampians.

“A mere doctor’s fad!” she pursued. “They would be far better here with me till October. Broadstairs, too, of all places!”