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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. 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 a large invasion of guests hasn’t severely strained your resources?”

Sarah glanced at him uncertainly and then she smiled. “Most of it comes out of the garden,” she admitted.

“Ah yes,” he observed, “I’ve heard that you spend most of your time digging up the flowers and tending the weeds! If you care to come over to the Manor some time I’ll show you over our gardens and lend you a few books on the subject.”

Sarah’s pleasure in the suggestion was so obvious that he chuckled.

“The trouble is,” she confided, “that I don’t always recognise the flowers from their illustrations. I have a great deal to learn!”

“All the more reason to come over and begin your education!” His grey eyes glinted at her, bringing an unexpected blush to her cheeks. “Have you done peering into those pots?”

Sarah was glad of the hot steam from the boiling vegetables on her face.

“Yes—yes, I think so.”

“Then stop dithering and come into the sitting room, Samantha is waiting to meet you.”

Samantha was everything that Sarah had been afraid she would be. She was tall and her hair was truly her crowning glory. Even more unfair, she had a pair of laughing green eyes and an air of enjoying everything that came her way. It was impossible to dislike her but, unfortunately, only too possible to envy everything about her.

“Sarah Blaney?” she exclaimed. “But I’ve heard of you! I saw you in an Agatha Christie! I was staying with my aunt—” She broke off to put her arm through Robert’s to gain his full attention. “I wish I’d known it was you! It would have been fun to come round and dragoon you into having a drink with us, or something!”

“Thank you,” Sarah said simply.

Madge glanced across the room at Samantha. “Was she any good?” she asked prettily.

Samantha’s smile was equally charming. “I’m not competent to say. She remembered all her lines—”

“And tripped over the hero’s feet to boot!” Robert interrupted.

“I did not!” Sarah protested.

“You surprise me!”’

Sarah gurgled with laughter, peeping up at him through her lashes. “The hero didn’t get in my way!”

Samantha frowned. “Is this a private joke?”

“Yes,” Madge added. “Tell us all about it. Though I can tell you how good my stepdaughter is as an actress. She was recently offered a part by Alec Farne in his new play. Of course, I won’t pretend that it was because she is the Actress of the Year, or anything like that! I think, though Sarah won’t admit it, that Alec found her equally taking off the stage!”

“Oh, Madge!”

“Well, he did take you out to dinner, dear!”

“When I resigned the part,” Sarah said bitterly. “Largely to give himself the pleasure of telling me that I’d never get anywhere if I didn’t put the part of the moment before my family and everything else. He told me I hadn’t the temperament to be great.”

“True,” Madge put in. “Clever Alec! He wouldn’t have given you the part, pet, if he hadn’t been a bit in love with you. I told you that!”

There was a silence in the room. Sarah clenched her fists by her sides and faced her stepmother. “Why not?” she asked.

Madge shrugged, laughing kindly at her. “Darling, you know why not! You may have been all right in a little repertory company, but surely you never thought you’d be a second Sarah Bernhardt?” She laughed again. “You need something extra for that ! It’s a pity you are your mother’s daughter and not mine, darling!” Sarah lifted her head proudly. “Not that it matters, but Alec Farne had never seen me before I auditioned for him. You should ask him if you don’t believe me.”

“I will,” said Madge. “You must invite him down here some time and then we can all judge for ourselves!” She smiled. “Or do you think he wouldn’t think it worth his while with me here to chaperone you?”

Sarah blenched. “I don’t know him well enough to say,” she insisted.

Samantha exchanged glances with Robert and anxiously cleared her throat. “I thought Sarah very good,” she began. “I remembered her, didn’t I?”

Sarah could have wished that she, of all people, didn’t feel compelled to be nice to her. With an effort she forced a smile and even laughed. “You haven’t got a drink, Mr. Chaddox,” she said. “What will you have ?”

But Robert ignored her. He was still looking at her stepmother, his admiration for her written clearly on his face.

“I think you underrate your stepdaughter,” he said slowly. “Sarah’s speaking voice is one of the most attractive I’ve ever heard. It was the first thing I noticed about her. And that, surely, is a great asset on the stage. Besides,” he added, with an apologetic glance at Sarah, “Neil assures me that make-up is everything on the boards. His mother was on the stage.”

Sarah’s heart warmed within her. “I thought you only noticed the soup!” she told him.

“That too!” he agreed. “But I wasn’t half as rude as I might have been if you hadn’t sounded so huskily apologetic.”

Sarah chuckled. “What an escape! I wish I’d known and I would have sounded sorrier still!”

“Was he horrid to you?” Neil asked with interest.

Sarah made a face at him. “What do you think?” Unconsciously she assumed Robert’s outraged expression. “If you can manage to get your car out of the car park intact—” she mimicked him.

Samantha and Neil both doubled up with laughter and even Robert gave her a dry smile that sent her spirits rollicking upwards. Only Madge found nothing funny in Sarah’s clever imitation of Robert’s way of speaking.

“Darling, I come down here to get away from stage talk! Be a dear and see what your father wants to drink, will you?” She watched her stepdaughter leave the room, her eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “And now let’s talk about Chaddoxboume, shall we? It’s such a pretty place and I long to get to know it better. Daniel and Sarah are so lucky to be going to be here all the time! If I didn’t have to work—but then someone has to pay the bills! And Robert certainly knows how to charge a fair rent!”

“It compares pretty favourably with London prices, Mrs. Blaney,” Robert said flatly.

“I’m not complaining!” Madge assured him. “And what’s all this about Mrs. Blaney ? Nobody
ever
calls me that! You must all call me Madge!”

THE sunny spell showed no sign of abating. Sarah was surprised to find that she had been in Chaddoxboume for nearly four weeks and had never seen a spot of rain. It had been a happy time, the only disturbances being her stepmother’s week-end visits and, that last week-end, her stepmother had been busy in London giving a charity performance and there had been nothing to upset the even tenor of their routine. In fact, Sarah admitted to herself, she hadn’t nearly enough to do. Her father was so much better that he was able to potter about the garden and sometimes to go down to the village shop to buy their supplies. Apart from the cooking and keeping the place clean, Sarah found herself living a life of complete leisure and that if it went on for very long she would soon be bored stiff.

She had discovered in the village the track of a nailbourne and, as she walked along it, she amused herself with recalling what Robert had told her about it. It must have been a very similar summer to this one when St. Augustine had first set foot on English soil. They said then that the intermittent streams came and went according to the prevailing fortunes of the Christian faith. St. Augustine’s first summer had been a very dry one and he had prayed for rain, a spring gushing forth on the spot where he knelt. But Woden and Thunor, the gods of old, who had caused the drought in the first place, were very angry and they dug great caverns under the earth and dried up the diverted waters with their fiery breath. So when Christianity is winning, the waters run, but when the old gods prevail, the waters disappear from the face of the earth.

Woden and Thunor were doing particularly well that year. The nailbourne was completely dry right down to where at other times it ran into the river. Along its bed Sarah could see various places which were sometimes flooded, and even a mark on the side of a bam where the waters had reached during one particular night of flood. It wasn’t very far to the river, but it was a pretty walk and had soon become one of Sarah’s favourites. It led past a hop field where the luxuriant bines were already heavy with the golden hops and nearly ripe for picking. Their strong smell scented the surrounding countryside and had caught at Sarah’s interest, the more particularly as the house she was living in was a converted oast-house.

The local farmer had told her that the bines are perennial, sending up new shoots every year which grow up a network of strings that are set up anew every year in the spring. The hops have to be coaxed up the strings by hand at first, a process known locally as ‘twiddling’, and then in late August the hops are picked, formerly by vast armies of women and children from the East End of London, but now more often by machine.