And when Aunt Georgina’s letter reached her she accepted the invitation. The wind had blown her South, now the wind was to blow her North. Free as a flying seed, she still was as is a seed, at the mercy of the winds. When would she be driven to the place where she might strike her roots and at last raise her leaf and her bud? She recalled Mr. Moon’s legend of the bird of paradise. It was one thing to the to the world, to devour the sweet spices and so for ever lose your foothold. It was another to find a resting place in some new way of life. She could still feel the lake swallows digging into her palms with their frantic claws. But of what use was their escape to them, if escape were all? Was Lawrence too, she wondered, without foothold in the world? It seemed to her that for a man the whole scheme of things must be different. Yet he too, as she could not forget, had conceived of his life as a seed foiled of its consummation.

IV

August was nearly over, when one evening she stepped down from the train at a Highland juction to be driven ten miles along wet, bog-scented roads to Aunt Georgina’s house which she then saw for the first time.

It stood, white-washed and four-square on its hill, with no creepers to break its bareness – a typical Perthshire dwelling of the severer sort, set in good, though not showy grounds. And on its wide semi-circular steps, confronting the terrace and the watery sunset, stood its mistress awaiting her guest.

Joanna, who first caught sight of the straight, unmistakable figure from a turn in the drive, was surprised by a familiar tremor. Since her mother’s funeral, when all family relations were abnormal, she had not seen her aunt; nor had she slept under her roof oftener than twice in the last ten years. And if, in the middle age, Lady Westermuir had been a person to strike terror into young bosoms, in old age she was even more intimidating. True, at that moment, in the yellow light that beat up against her from the wet gravel, turning her widow’s cap with its precise goffering into a moulding of pale brass, she might from the waist downward have stood to a sculptor for the figure of Charity, the folds of her skirts – black now instead of prune-coloured – flowed out so generously at either side, ballooning slightly in the air as she advanced. But no Caritas ever kept shoulders so erect as these under the brown and scarlet Paisley shawl: and the triumphant clash of cymbals would better than any more Christian music have expressed these leonine features.