The child’s first thought, that her cousin was the victim of some terrible blemish, passed almost at once. There could be no mistaking his unassumed indifference. So in a moment she knew she must accept this strange thing as normal. Men – grown-up young men – were like this. Later on she often visualized those amazing ankles guiltily. But she would not for the world have spoken of her discovery, not even to Georgie.

VI

Yet another incident which made its mark on the still folded woman in Joanna, belonged to this time at Duntravie. And like the ecstasy by the upper pond it happened during the Bannermans’ last summer there, when the girl was entering her teens.

She and the others – with Mabel, who always spent July with them – had been making blaeberry wine down in front of the house by that same burn which farther on flowed beneath the saw-mill. It was late afternoon on one of these endless midsummer days of childhood in the North when the sun puts off its setting till long, long after bed-time. The children had been up on the moor for hours past with mugs and baskets, picking the new ripened fruit which grows so fragrant and near the ground, its leaves showing dapper among the heather. Their faces and hands, their bare legs and under-clothes, were stained with purple. They had eaten their fill, and had rolled afterwards on the green, richly-decked table of the moor. And now using their handkerchiefs as strainers, they were crushing the gathered berries till the dark juice ran through into jars beneath. Three times a sounding call had come from the house, and at last Georgie and Mabel lingeringly climbed the bank towards the road, dragging the small boys with them.

“Come on to supper, Joanna,” they cried over their shoulders in their young high voices, as they came to the rickety one-legged gate of the garden. But Joanna, though she cried in return that she was “just coming,” made no movement to follow them.

Instead she began to trail her dyed handkerchief in the water, startling the little shadowy trout that were so hard to catch; and every now and then she tossed back the long loosened strands of her hair, the better to see her own reflection in the brown mirror of the stream. Dreamily, she wished she were as pretty as the little girl in the water.