“It was quite good—­the matter of it,” Joan told her.  “All Roads lead to Calvary.  The idea is that there comes a time to all of us when we have to choose.  Whether, like your friend Carlyle, we will ‘give up things’ for our faith’s sake.  Or go for the carriage and pair.”

Mary Stopperton laughed.  “He is quite right, dear,” she said.  “It does seem to come, and it is so hard.  You have to pray and pray and pray.  And even then we cannot always do it.”  She touched with her little withered fingers Joan’s fine white hand.  “But you are so strong and brave,” she continued, with another little laugh.  “It won’t be so difficult for you.”

It was not until well on her way home that Joan, recalling the conversation, found herself smiling at Mary Stopperton’s literal acceptation of the argument.  At the time, she remembered, the shadow of a fear had passed over her.

Mary Stopperton did not know the name of the preacher.  It was quite common for chance substitutes to officiate there, especially in the evening.  Joan had insisted on her acceptance of a shilling, and had made a note of her address, feeling instinctively that the little old woman would “come in useful” from a journalistic point of view.

Shaking hands with her, she had turned eastward, intending to walk to Sloane Square and there take the bus.  At the corner of Oakley Street she overtook him.  He was evidently a stranger to the neighbourhood, and was peering up through his glasses to see the name of the street; and Joan caught sight of his face beneath a gas lamp.

And suddenly it came to her that it was a face she knew.  In the dim-lit church she had not seen him clearly.  He was still peering upward.  Joan stole another glance.  Yes, she had met him somewhere.  He was very changed, quite different, but she was sure of it.  It was a long time ago.  She must have been quite a child.

CHAPTER II

One of Joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room.  Her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her.  She must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame.  Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face.  It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath.  And then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.

“You young imp of Satan!” demanded Mrs. Munday—­her feelings of outraged virtue exaggerating perhaps her real sentiments.  “What are you doing?”