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Dressed in die barest of bikinis, she still looked better than her stepdaughter would have done in the same garb and she knew it.
    “Fetch my book, darling, will you?” she asked Sarah. “I’m too lazy to go upstairs again. Have you got dinner under control? It was quite difficult to persuade Robert Chaddox that it would be quite all right for them all to come. I don’t care for him much, I must say. He looked at me as if I were something the cat had dragged in.”
    “He doesn’t go for Thespians,” Sarah murmured.
    Her stepmother smiled with a self-satisfied air. “Well, well, we’ll have to change that! My book, please, dear. It’s the thriller with the lurid cover beside my bed.”
    Sarah was too busy after that to exchange more than a few words with her stepmother. Cooking was still a relatively new art to her and she fussed over the meal as though her life depended on it. It would be too awful, she kept telling herself, if anything was to go wrong the first time Robert came to the oast-house as their guest. Even if she wasn’t pretty, she would like him to think that she had all the usual feminine skills that instinct told her he would approve of.
    In the end she hardly allowed herself sufficient time to change and she was still upstairs when the door-bell rang.
    “I’ll go!” Madge’s voice floated up to her.
    Sarah struggled into her dress and at the same time tried to catch what they were saying in the hall below. Her stepmother’s voice, clearly produced as always, was warm and distinct.
    “Mr. Chaddox! Or may I call you Robert? And this is your brother Neil. I was so afraid I’d get your names wrong and look the perfect dunce that I am. And you must be Samantha!”
    Sarah gave way to temptation and, still smoothing down her dress, she tiptoed across the landing and peered over the banisters to see the unknown Samantha. All she could see was a cloud of bright red hair and a splash of brilliant yellow that was the skirt of the other girl’s dress. Sarah went back into her room and took a long look at herself in the mirror. Her own nut-coloured hair looked dull beside the fiery locks she had just seen, and her features, with her high cheekbones and mobile expression, only managed to annoy her by their very ordinariness. With a petulant gesture, of a kind that she seldom indulged in, she turned on her heel and went in search of her father.
    Daniel Blaney was not yet dressed. Sarah took one look at him and hurried him back into bed.
    “Madge won’t be pleased,” he whispered.
    “Nonsense, Dad. The whole point of our coming here is that you should get better. I’ll bring your dinner up on a tray. Okay?”
    He nodded, breathing heavily. “Thank you, my dear.”
    Sarah fled down the stairs and into the kitchen to check on her last-minute preparations for the meal. The hall was dark as someone had shut the door into the sitting room and she herself had shut the kitchen door earlier, so she didn’t see that anyone was standing there and ran slap into Robert Chaddox, spilling the jug of water he was holding in his hand.
    “Oh dear!” she exclaimed.
    “Where’s the fire?” he countered at precisely the same moment.
    “I didn’t see you,” she excused herself.
    “You didn’t look!”
    “Well, you shouldn’t go round hiding in shadows!” She took a step backwards and looked at him more closely. “Did any of the water go on you?”
    “No thanks to you, I heard you coming and took appropriate avoiding action!” He shook his head at her. “Is your father coming down?”
    Sarah blinked quickly to hide tears that the thought of her father brought, unbidden, to her eyes. “No,” she said. “He doesn’t feel well enough. W-won’t you go back to the others? I’ll join you in a minute.”
    But if she had hoped to escape his sharp grey eyes until she had herself under better control, she was doomed to disappointment.
    “Are you doing the cooking?” he asked her. “Smells good! I hope such