It had been raining since dawn, but towards evening the sky cleared, and Linnet suggested that they should all go fishing in the bay. It was a job to get started, but once down the steep lane from the house Juley was easy to manage. With encouraging cries the four hauled the rowing-boat down the stony beach; and Juley, very heavy and awkward, was helped aboard from the little jetty. When they had anchored over the fishing-ground, quarrelled amicably over the lines, and baited their hooks, the mother gazed at the lingering sunset and felt that Heaven was very near to earth. Memories of the early days of her motherhood brought happy tears, and she turned her swimming eyes from the radiant west to her full-grown sons and daughters beside her. Georgie was exclaiming excitedly as she wound in the jerking line. She was sure it was either three whiting at once, or an enormous dog-fish which Sholto would have trouble in killing. And when a very small but vigorous lythe appeared over the side they all shouted with laughter at her. Joanna caught three flounders running, through forgetting to pull her hooks a yard up from the bottom; but Juley said she liked flounders better than whiting, and was going to have these cooked for supper that very night. Linnet had no luck at all, and kept shifting his tackle from one side to the other, till at last he got settled in the bows with his Norfolk-coated back to his mother, and she noticed how like his father he was growing about the shoulders, one hitched a little higher than the other. Sholto astern, held his line between his knees. Both his hands were busy with a Jew’s harp. It was, he said, the appropriate instrument for the son of a Mother in Israel!

Then as the deliberate Northern night drew on, and they began to feel cold, they shipped the anchor and rowed back, the four taking an oar each. Being used to boats since they could remember, all rowed well. At the end of each stroke the phosphorescence streamed from their blades simultaneously, and went swarming like millions of fireflies into the black water. And keeping time with their strokes the Bannermans sang. They sang “A Southerly Wind and a Cloudy Sky,” and many old rounds and catches they had learned in the nursery from their father – for Sholto, in his youth had been a great choir-member. And their voices, on the quiet stretch of hill-shadowed loch, sounded very happy, very youthful and plaintive. Juley could not join in for tears; besides though she had a pretty voice, she was apt, she knew, to go out of tune, and she would not for anything have spoiled her children’s singing.

X

But in autumn, with Georgie gone, Mabel again in Edinburgh, and the old life in Collessie Street resumed, Joanna sank into a kind of marasmus – a wasting without fever or apparent disease.