Pebbles from a Northern Shore

  *****

  Conversation continued far into the evening, pleasantly lubricated, so that Anne went to her room later than usual and slightly less steady on her feet. The picture of the jester's daughter caught her eye and she took it down for a closer examination. She worked in an art gallery and had some appreciation of the technicalities. It really wasn't very skilfully done, but well enough to show a face that must have been very attractive in its day. The appearance of sorrow that she had noticed on a previous occasion was evidently a trick of the light on the brush-strokes, and came and went as she turned it. A sense of undefined longing came over her. "This is ridiculous," she thought. "I'm tired, I'm half-sloshed, I'm worried about John" - she had been thinking that if he didn't make a move soon she would have to consider cutting her losses - "and probably reading my own anxieties into a quite different situation. Whatever it may have been." But nevertheless she kept hoping, in waking moments during a rather disturbed night, that if the girl's sadness had been real, it had come right for her in the end.