No one seeing her aloof eyes and still face would have guessed at the eagerness of the girl’s search. Young men feared her, knowing she hardly saw them. Yet at eighteen, a little weary of fruitless emotion, a little dream-sick, the conviction had begun to force itself on Joanna that she was without attraction. For the past ten years she had lavished unreciprocated passion on individuals of both sexes. She had worshipped Gerald Bird, had longed to reclaim the boozing organist of St. Jude’s, had trembled in the presence of her geography teacher at the High School – a plain, middle-aged woman with mysterious eyes. And these were but three out of many. But never yet, so far as Joanna knew had she figured for an instant in the dreams of another human being, and she was beginning to give up hope. Clearly she foresaw a dismal stretch of life to an unloved old age.

CHAPTER FIVE

I

Two years passed in this way; and when Joanna was twenty and full of desperation, she heard that Bob Ranken was coming to Glasgow or his Easter holiday.

She had been seventeen the last time she saw her old playmate, he eighteen. Two years after his interview with Juley, Doctor Ranken’s health had begun to fail; and after struggling on gallantly for a while with a “colleague and successor,” he had retired as “minister emeritus” to Tun-bridge Wells, where he had a married sister. He himself had been long a widower. He had hoped rather than suggested that Bob should enter the ministry. But the boy was set on being a mining engineer, and on leaving school went to South Kensington to study at the School of Mines.

Thenceforward his visits to Glasgow had been rare. But on Easter immediately following Joanna’s twentieth birthday Dr. Ranken was sent to Bad Nauheim and Bob came to stay with one of the oldest families of the St. Jude’s congregation, the Boyds of High Kelvin Place.

From the moment Joanna heard from Mamie Boyd that Bob was expected, her imagination busied itself with the coming meeting. In her condition any excitement was welcome. But most welcome of all was an excitement that promised to bring nearer to her that great and solid world, in the existence of which she believed as only your dreamer can believe.

Would Bob be much changed? she wondered. And gazing into her mirror she tried to see herself with his eyes. Would he tease her about her long skirts and her hair done up? (She wore it in a fine shining knob now on the top of her head.) It was wonderful how suddenly her lassitude gave place to gaiety.