She chose one of the higher terraces on her right, where many a time as a child she had bowled a hoop and started to run. Her feet made hardly any sound speeding along the path of hard earth, and her light balanced body was exonerated in its flight through the dusk.

But before reaching the flagstaff and the group of Crimean guns that threaten the University from their height, she sat down on a bench and stayed there motionless awhile. From here she overlooked the whole park. Behind her curved the topmost terrace, with its stone balustrade and its crown of steep French roofs. Below, lay the level murkiness where moving water was, and captive wild birds uttered disturbing cries. Triple globes marked where the new granite bridge spanned the Kelvin, and in places a pair of yellow lamps showed how a cab threaded one of the wider ways. It was a little world to itself, shut in and stuporose. But beyond it to the south, where a brilliant segment of light marked its confines, Joanna could see where the real world began. Nay, she could hear, coming from the Clyde across all that distance yet as if it were the beating of her own heart the dull, steady pounding of the yards.

But when the first quiverings of pleasure were subsided, the beauty and pathos of her surroundings became a trouble to her, and she wondered, as she had wondered countless times before, why this should be. Why was she not content simply to admire and enjoy loveliness when she had perceived it? Why must she suffer from the desire, herself, to be or do some loveliness? What was this ever-thwarted need of her being to give itself utterly to the achievement of she knew not what? She recalled her mother’s words years ago, on seeing the Clyde shipping in sunshine, “Let us make our lives to match it.” And passionately Joanna wanted to conform to loveliness. She longed to be in harmony with the beauty she had always worshipped. But how? Perhaps, as Dr. Ranken had so often used his pulpit to say, this desire ever unfulfilled, and this oppression, proved that her home was in heaven, not on earth. Her mother, she knew, believed this. And was there not something in one’s soul which proclaimed it to be true?

She rose slowly. She was tired again, and unhappy and the evening was barren of magic. Still with a certain saving stolidity she persevered in her resolution and walked on to the University.

There she learned that she was too late, as the matriculation office was closed for the day. It was scarcely a disappointment.