"I haven't been away more than a year, Aunt Janet," laughed Joan; "you talk as if it had been centuries."
"It has seemed long," the other woman answered; her eyes were hungry on the girl's face as if she sought for something that kept eluding her. "A year is a long time to people of our age."
"Dear, silly, old Aunt Janet." Joan hugged her. "You are not a second older nor the tiniest fragment different to what you used to be. I know you don't like being hugged; it makes you untidy; but you have simply got to be just once more."
"You always were harum-scarum," remonstrated Aunt Janet, under this outburst. She did not, however, offer any real objection and they went into the drawing-room hand-in-hand.
A small, thin lady rose to greet them at their entrance and Joan was introduced to Miss Abercrombie. Everything about Miss Abercrombie, except her size, seemed to denote strength—strength of purpose, strength of will, strength of love and hate. She gave Joan the impression—and hers was a face that demanded study, Joan found herself looking at it again and again—of having come through great battles against fate. And if she had not won—the tell-tale lines of discontent that hung about her mouth did not betoken victory—at least she had not been absolutely defeated. She had carried the banner of her convictions through thick and thin.
Joan was roused to a sudden curiosity to know what those convictions were and a desire to have the same courage granted to herself. It gave her a thrill of pleasure to hear that Miss Abercrombie would be staying on for some time. She was a schoolmistress, it appeared, only just lately health had interfered with her duties and it was then that Aunt Janet had persuaded her, after many attempts, to take a real holiday and spend it at Wrotham.
"Sheer vice on my part, agreeing," Miss Abercrombie told Joan with a laugh; "but everyone argued with me all at once and I succumbed."
"Just in time," Aunt Janet reminded her; "I was going to have given up asking you; even friendship has its limits."
They had tea in the drawing-room with the windows open on to the garden and a small, bright fire burning in the grate. Aunt Janet said she had discovered a nip in the air that morning and was sure Joan would feel cold after London. Uncle John wandered in and drank a cup of tea and wandered out again without paying much attention to anyone.
Aunt Janet sat and watched Joan, and the girl, conscious of the scrutiny and restless under those brown eyes as she had always been restless in the old days with a childish, unconfessed sin on her conscience, talked as lightly and as quickly as she could upon every topic under the sun to Miss Abercrombie. And Miss Abercrombie rose like a sportswoman to the need. She was too clever a reader of character not to feel the strain which rested between her two companions. She knew Aunt Janet through and through, the stern loyalty, the unbending precision of a nature slow to anger, full of love, but more inclined to justice than mercy where wrongdoing was concerned. And Joan—well, she had only known Joan half an hour, but Aunt Janet had been talking of nothing else for the last fortnight.