Here followed a rough diagram of the Zodiacal signs.

“This then,” ran the letter again, “is why I write to you of all my kindred. Though you are of a younger generation, and I doubt not that whatever you have heard of me from your deluded, conventional father and my poor weak sister, must have prejudiced you against me. Probably also you are stupid. But you were born in March; and this gives me hope that my voice will pierce through all the falseness and deadness enclosing a sister soul. I believe that some day you will come out to this glorious land of liberty, and sunshine, this refuge of great-hearted exiles like myself, like dear Byron, like Shelley, and a host of others to whom freedom was life —” The letter ended with a fervent if indefinite invitation.

Joanna’s interest was excited. She resented her aunt’s disparagement of her parents; the Zodiacal signs did not greatly impress her; but she was roused because of the immediate echoing of her own nature to Aunt Perdy’s. The letter meant to her far more than it said, and it did more than it meant. It opened an unsuspected door of escape. She remembered now, of a sudden, how her mother had sometimes sadly remarked upon a likeness between her and the strange aunt. This must now be verified, and instantly.

She ran downstairs to the drawing-room. And there, kneeling all eagerness before the inlaid cabinet, with its glass doors at either side displaying missionary trophies, she lifted out the family album. It had gilt-edged boards and brass clamps and clasps, and lay heavy on her lap as she opened it.

Yes, here was Aunt Perdy, one of a group of quaint little girls with long drawers showing under their funny dresses. And here she was, coquettish in a voluminous riding-habit looped up in half a dozen places, with her hair in a net, and a tiny billy-cock hat tipped over her nose. And here again she looked up from an open book, her chin in her hand, her pretty elbow on a fringed table, her soul in her eyes. In all the full-face portraits, the eyes – rather more deeply set in the head than Joanna’s – were remarkable, oracular in their intensity.

Earnestly searching for a likeness to herself, the girl found it most clear in a carte-de-visite photograph in which her aunt was looking down at a baby on her knees, while a little boy (surely Gerald!) leaned against his mother’s full skirts, his legs in their striped trousers mannishly crossed. Here the capricious sunlight had proclaimed the resemblance unmistakably, and Joanna saw that it was one of contour rather than of features. There was a faintly Japanese suggestion, a flatness of structure. It must have been this, thought Joanna, that had made Nilsson, one of the Art School masters, tell her once how like she was to a primitive Siennese painting.