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unknown Samantha as she went into the kitchen to make the tea for her stepmother. She looked anxiously at her small stock of food and began to plan the meal for that evening. She could make soup, she thought, from the vegetables in the garden and, at a pinch, the leg of lamb would run to six, though it wasn’t as big as she would have wished, and she could follow that with a gooseberry fool, also made from fruit from the garden.
    Samantha would be beautiful, she knew that, and she would resent her because she was almost sure that Robert Chaddox was in love with her. She sighed deeply. Perhaps if she made up very carefully and was madly witty and smiled a lot she would outshine Samantha’s beauty? But that was only another silly dream and better forgotten, only she did wish that it didn’t hurt quite so much to resign herself to the inevitable.
    When she went back to the circular sitting room, Madge was busy trying out all the chairs with a view to finding the most comfortable for her own use.
    “Ah, tea! Sarah, my love, are you going to die of boredom in this dreary hole? What have you done with yourself these last few days? I nearly fainted when I saw how isolated it is here.”
    Sarah forbore to say that she had spent much of the time dreaming that she had been transformed into an outstanding beauty overnight, and laughed. “I like it,” she said. “I’ve spent most of my time in the garden. I never knew it was such a fascinating occupation before. I don’t know the names of anything, or which are the weeds, but everyone who passes gives me advice and marvels over my ignorance. One man even offered to keep the lawn mowed for me. I think he means to use the Manor’s lawn-mower, but I’m not enquiring too closely into that! When I tried, it took me nearly an hour with the machine I found in the shed, and he does it in about ten minutes flat!”
    Her stepmother stared at her in astonishment. “But your hands!” she said faintly.
    Sarah glanced down at her neat, well-kept hands and smiled. “They seem to be tougher than they look. Where’s Daddy?”
    Madge shrugged. “I couldn’t bear him wheezing over me any longer. I told him to go upstairs and get into bed. By the way, darling—” she paused significantly as Sarah poured her father out a cup of tea and prepared to take it up to him—“I suppose my room is the one above here?”
    Sarah nodded abstractedly. “Is Daddy—all right?”
    “I suppose so,” her stepmother returned with a touch of irritation. “He would have called out if he wasn’t. He’s not completely helpless!” ’
    “No, I suppose not,” Sarah agreed.
    She thought her father looked very tired and drawn when she took him his tea.
    “Will it be a nuisance to you to bring my lunch up here?” he asked her, breathing with a painful intensity. “If I have to get up for dinner—”
    “You don’t have to!” Sarah exclaimed. She caught sight of the spray that he had half-hidden by his pillow. “Isn’t there anything to be done?” Her voice caught in the back of her throat and she swallowed hastily.
    “A change of atmosphere,” he said slowly. “Don’t worry, my dear, I’ll pull out of it when we’re here on our own for a bit. Madge thinks it’s revenge because they wouldn’t use my sets in her show. If it is, it’s quite unconscious! My conscious mind would have chosen a far less exhausting way of showing my displeasure!”
    “Did you mind so much?” Sarah couldn’t resist asking.
    “No. It seemed remarkably unimportant, as a matter of fact. Perhaps that’s why they rejected them. I didn’t care enough about the show to produce anything of any value—”
    “But is it good for Madge?”
    His twisted smile made a mockery of her indignant question. “A rather elderly teenager, don’t you think?” was all he said.
    “I haven’t seen the show,” Sarah said.
    “Take my advice, don’t!” he smiled at her.
    Madge lay in the sun in the garden that afternoon.