Bladon's Rock

BLADON'S ROCK Pamela Kent

Richard was coming home! When Valentine first met Doctor Gaston Lamoine, the famous neurologist, she found herself provoked by his remark that they were both ships that pass in the night. The remark didn't say very much for the impression she had made on him. But why should this bother her? For as long as Valentine could remember, Richard Sterne had been the most important person in her life. But he had loved only the beautiful Roxanne, whose disappearance had left him rootless and restless. Now Roxanne had returned, intent on marrying Richard, but Richard's reaction to her no longer mattered to Valentine. For now she had met Dr. Gaston Lamoine, the man who showed her what it was like to really love. Yet Roxanne seemed to have a hold on Gaston, too!

CHAPTER ONE FAR below her the sea crooned slumbrously, and Valentine remembered that it had always been like that on a warm day in summer. Siren voices, she and Roxanne had called that lazy enticing murmur ... She looked back at the house, and as always it appeared to be slipping slightly. The grey, crenellated edge of the tower they had called the watch-tower was definitely out of alignment with the blue of the sky behind it, and the massive front door, which she could see as she approached slowly up the path, had a slightly drunken appearance as it leaned in(its stone supports with the three stooping falcons above the crumbling arch. The three stooping falcons were part of the Bladon coat of arms. They reappeared constantly in the stonework of the building, and were even included as a kind of talisman in the present-day furnishings. Or they had been when the house belonged to the Bladons. Valentine looked about her at the neglected gardens as she drew nearer to the house. At one time they had been smooth with lawns and. deep and dark with shrubberies. There had been a rose garden that was always heavy with scent at this season of the year, and an orchard famous for russet apples and Jargonelle pears. There had been glasshouses and forcing-houses and a vast kitchen garden. And all right on top of the sea, filled with the sound of it by day and by night, the high rooms of the house lit by the reflected light of the sea. Valentine paused at the foot of the flight of steps that led up to the front door, and decided there was no point in knocking. The house was empty, she knew. Mrs. Duffy had told her that a new pair of

caretakers were expected the following week, and it would be part of their job to get the place in order for the return of Richard. Valentine wondered what he would be like after two years of wandering in the forests of Brazil. It was strange, she thought, that a man like Richard— who had everything except Roxanne— should be unable to settle down and extract some sort of pleasure from that which was indisputably his. Bladon's Rock, for instance—and Valentine loved every stone of the old house— should have had some power to console him. He could have written here, got on with plays he had intended to write. He could have cultivated tomatoes in the quarter of a mile of glasshouses, grown raspberries, strawberries, lettuces. Surely he would have liked to see his own produce being loaded on to lorries for the local market? The London market! The locals would have been glad of the chance of employment. The trouble was. that Richard was too rich to need to do anything. It would have been like playing at doing things, and he knew it. It had always been necessary for him to have some justification for whatever he did. A walk was undertaken because it led to the river, and he had an old boat tied up there. The cliffs were scaled for birds' eggs, and not for the fun of scaling the cliffs. Marriage, when the time was ripe for him to marry, was a good idea because it would enable him to spend the rest of his life with Roxanne. Only unfortunately Roxanne herself had other ideas, and they didn't include marriage. She was a great success in Richard's first play, and she saved his second play from being torn apart by the critics. After that she grew tired of being a success, and went off on some lonely European journey by herself, writing a book about her experiences afterwards. She lived with gypsies and became involved in

politics, and was reported to have had an affair with a doctor behind the Iron Curtain. Valentine often wondered whether she married him, but Roxanne was not the type to admit to marriage or anything else if it amused her to keep silent. Just as Richard liked justification for what he did, Roxanne liked to be thought unorthodox, and was extremely unorthodox. The last time Valentine saw her she was as lovely as ever, however. Perhaps lovelier than she had ever been. And that was two years ago. What had happened to Roxanne in the interim? Mrs. Duffy had tea ready for Valentine when she got back to the cottage. It was quite a small cottage in the centre of the village, but her Aunt Kit had filled it with some costly treasures. There was the ivory elephant someone had brought her from Bangkok, a whole series of Satsuma bowls and vases, a collection of jade cats that was kept in a Buhl- fronted cabinet. Apart from that the furniture was shabby, the rosewood writing-desk—although Sheraton—in the sitting-room too badly chipped and scarred to be of interest to an auctioneer. And every time Valentine entered the cottage she wanted to strip off its faded floor coverings and the smothering folds of drapery at the windows. But all in good time. She didn't want to disturb things too soon. Her Aunt Kit had only recently died and left her the cottage, and it wouldn't look like an act of gratitude if she started obliterating the old lady's personality before the lawyers got down to the business of submitting the will for probate. As she poured herself a cup of tea and helped herself to a slice of soda bread she told Mrs. Duffy what she intended to do when she did get down to the task of digging herself in.

'I'll have a studio built on to the house, overlooking the sea. I'll be able to work there.' She felt her spirits rise, and some of the depression that had settled on her as a result of seeing Bladon's Rock that afternoon evaporated. 'I've decided to give up my London flat.' Mrs. Duffy, plump and amiable, beamed at her. 'Fancy you having that exhibition in London, and having it written about in the papers! I've put the cutting away in my dresser drawer for safety. I couldn't get over it: "Miss Valentine Shaw whose lovely models are fetching high prices ..Children's and animals' heads, or so they tell me. Will you be working down here, Miss Val? I used to think you wanted to be an artist.' 'I can't paint. Duffy. Not really well. But of course I'll have a few shots at the sea out there— sunsets and dawns, and so on—now .that I'm living right beside it.' She walked to the window and thrust aside the shrouding draperies. The lovely light on the sea— the lovely, soft, golden, westering light—put a light into her own eyes. 'I'll have a wonderful time now that I'm back where I belong. You know, Duffy, I always enjoyed my visits to Aunt Kit. I always felt that this was much more my part of the world than Harrogate. If my father's practice hadn't been there, and if I could have persuaded him to give it up and come and live here, I'd have done so! As it is, I've had to wait until I'm twenty-six to settle down where I really want to live!' Mrs. Duffy regarded her as if she either couldn't, or wouldn't believe her. 'You don't look twenty-six, Miss Val. You don't look a day older than twenty.'

Valentine walked to a mirror and studied herself. 'If you want my opinion, I look much older than twenty-six,' she said sombrely. Would Duffy understand, she wondered, if she explained to her that, although very little experience of life as it ought to be lived had come her way, she felt like a woman of vast experience? As if fate had singled her out to be taught a lesson early in life! 'It's no use looking at my hair,' she said, touching the golden beauty of it. 'It's my only attribute, and hairdressers can always do a lot with it. My eyes are neither green nor brown, and as I crinkle them up when I concentrate, and that puts wrinkles into my forehead, I've lost the carefree look of youth. In addition I now have to wear glasses when I'm working. My skin is sallow, because I hardly ever get any real fresh air -' 'You'll get lots of it now,' Mrs. Duffy interposed placidly. Valentine wheeled on her and looked at her fixedly. 'Do you remember what a gorgeous, paper-white skin Roxanne had? Roxanne Bladon! And her eyes were really green, her hair no silly compromise, but red, red as fire!' Mrs. Duffy went round collecting together the tea things, and making a noisy rattle of crockery as she did so. 'Miss Roxanne was a beauty all right,' she admitted, 'but what good did it do her? If you're twenty-six she must be thirty-two now. She was a good six years older than you. And although we all thought she'd make a wonderful marriage she didn't marry anyone that we've heard about.' Her voice grew cagey. 'Of course, she had those two or three years on the stage, but I'm not struck on stage folk.'

'She left the stage a long time ago,' Valentine said quietly. 'I know. And after that ... what?' 'Did you ever see her?' Valentine asked, still more quietly. 'I mean, have you seen her recently?' Mrs. Duffy dropped the honey spoon, and picked it up, grumbling because every time-she bent it gave her rheumatism an opportunity to torment her. 'She came here about three months ago. Spent a night at my cottage. She wanted to see Bladon's Rock.' 'And do you think she also wanted to see Mr. Sterne?' This time it was Mrs. Duffy who whirled on Valentine, Her elderly face looked quite indignant, her eyes angry. 'And why should she want to see Mr. Sterne?' she asked. 'All those years ago, when she might have married him, she turned him down. She caused him to go off wandering about the world, when he might have settled down. And now, when she's lost her looks, why should she come creeping to him?' Valentine gasped. 'I'll never believe that Roxanne's lost her looks!' Mrs. Duffy shrugged. 'You can't have everything all the time. I'd say she hasn't merely lost them, she's got little to offer any man now. The night she spent with me she looked thin and half starved, her clothes were shabby,

her purse empty. She borrowed ten pounds from me. She hasn't returned it.' 'She will,' Valentine said, in a shaken voice. Mrs. Duffy shrugged again. 'I'm not worrying. I'm not all that hard up. My cottage is my own, and I've a little bit in the bank. Mr. Sterne adds to it from time to time.' 'Do you know when he's coming back?' Valentine asked. Mrs. Duffy's face grew contented and placid again. 'Oh, yes, I know! On the twenty-fourth ... Midsummer Day. The house is being got ready for him, cleaned and repainted from top to bottom. I've even heard that some of the old furniture is being sent away, and some new stuff will be arriving. He's bringing a lot of people with him. The new caretakers will act as cook and houseman, and I'm to get a couple of girls from the village to help out—if I can.' Valentine felt the blood begin to pound heavily in her veins. 'Mr. Sterne pays good wages. It shouldn't be so difficult.' 'Girls don't like housework nowadays. They prefer the new canning factory at Little Hardstone.' Valentine turned away. She walked back to the fireplace. It was absurd, she thought, almost frightened by the turmoil her whole being had been thrown into by the simple announcement that Richard was returning on the twenty-fourth. After all these years she ought to have got Richard so well and truly out of her system

that even if they came face to face tonight it shouldn't upset her. She should be able to feel simple pleasure in seeing him again, greet him with calm eyes and a ready, welcoming smile. 'Richard, Richard!' she should be able to exclaim, her whole face lighting up with the enthusiasm of an old and tried friend. 'How wonderful! I've often thought about you, hoped we would meet again soon, and that you would tell me about all the exciting things you've been doing!' Whereas the very thought of meeting Richard made her legs tremble. If his eyes were quizzical, as they so often were, she would feel that he was amused by the secret he read in her face. If there were a lot of people with him, and some of them were women, she would know that she had never been of any more importance to him than the hound he left behind, and who had been cared for by the local veterinary surgeon, the stable cat, whom he permitted to have kittens in his dressing-room. In fact, she knew that already. He would ask after the stable cat much more quickly than he would ask after her, Valentine. And as for the hound, it would once more spread itself out on his hearth, and he probably had a handsome new collar for it somewhere among his baggage. Mrs. Duffy looked across at her and spoke gently. 'I should go to bed early, Miss Val. You look tired. That was a long walk you took this afternoon right out to the headland. I'll be in in the morning to get your breakfast.' Valentine's face twisted wryly as soon as she was alone. She looked tired! Which meant that she looked every one of her twenty-six years, and could no longer scramble about cliff paths as she had done years ago. She was out of condition ... a city dweller.

And both she and Roxanne, apparently, were a part of the past ... Richard Sterne's past, as well as the local past.

CHAPTER TWO SHE sat for a long time with the curtains drawn back, watching the sea before she went to bed. She found the noise of it soothing, as she had always done, and the sight of the moon's path on the gently heaving water reminded her of other moons and other warm and starry nights full of sound and the smell of the sea. Nights at Bladon's Rock when lights streamed from the windows and couples danced in the long room at the side of the house. Music and laughter and gaiety, cars streaming away at the dawn, and those who were left eating bacon and eggs on the scrubbed (kitchen table while an angry cook protested in her dressing-gown from the back stairs. Nights on the cliff top, lured by the sweetness of the wind, feet deep sunk in wild thyme and tiny trefoil flowers; nights in little boats with softly chugging outboard motors, nosing into secret coves, discovering secret worlds. Moonlight picnics, bathing parties, racing on the sand. Nights when the local fishing fleet allowed them to accompany them, and they had fresh caught mackerel for breakfast and slept the clock round afterwards. All those things happened while Roxanne's parents still owned Bladon's Rock, and they also happened after the Sternes became the owners of it. Mrs. Sterne was as party-minded as Mrs. Bladon had been, and she had a lot more money to make things go with a swing. She tried to entice Roxanne to the house whenever she possibly could, for Roxanne was Richard's choice from the moment he set eyes on her. Roxanne at that time could not have been more than fifteen. She was long-legged and coltish and fantastically beautiful. Richard, an elegant young man who drove a cream-coloured Jaguar and was

trying to kill three years at Oxford, devoted all his free time to her and became a kind of happy slave. Valentine was always certain it was Roxanne's eyes, brilliantly green like the eyes of a snake, that had him mesmerized. They could command him, antagonize him, infuriate him, and make him wretchedly unhappy. He would drop everything to take her to the circus, to the cinema in Whitehaven, or on a shopping spree. Roxanne liked unsuitable clothes, and he encouraged her to buy outrageous evening dresses and dizzy-heeled brocaded shoes. He himself bought her jewellery ... costume jewellery, he called it, but Valentine knew it didn't come from the sort of shop that sold costume jewellery. He taught her to drive, ride, fish, and swim like a seal. He named a smart little blue-painted motor launch after her, and took her for excursions along the coast. They discovered an island and called it their island. In time it, too, became known as Roxanne's Isle, and they were marooned on it for twenty-four hours when the motor launch developed a fault, and no one knew where they were. Everyone expected an announcement of their engagement long before Roxanne was twenty-one, but on her twenty-first birthday—although Mrs. Sterne gave her a wonderful party—no announcement was made. On her twenty-second birthday Roxanne was the hope of a drama school in London, and she celebrated it with her fellow pupils. When she was twenty-three she starred in Richard's first play, and Richard gave her a diamond necklace. By the time she was twenty-five no one knew where Roxanne was, and Richard was escorting a blonde about London, and having her down at Bladon's Rock for weekends.

Valentine, nineteen, and staying with her aunt, would have given anything, even her hope of happiness, for one noticing glance from Richard. But she never received it. To him she was always 'the funny little thing who was a pallid reflection of Roxanne, and followed her about like a kitten'. He was always nice to her, in a big-brotherly kind of way. He told her to cut her hair when her aunt wanted it to remain long, intervened when she was left out of a party and insisted that she came along, and even bought her a present once when he remembered her birthday. It was a crocodile handbag with expensive gold trimmings, and she was still using it and was unlikely to discard it altogether while it could still be put to use. He also thought she was clever with her fingers, and bought one of her earliest models, a delicate replica of Roxanne's head, which he kept on the desk in his London flat. The last time Valentine saw him he was preparing to leave for Brazil. He was giving a theatre and supper party, and Valentine had been presented with a ticket for the same show. She was waiting in the foyer for the crowd to disperse and the rain to cease before darting out to try and find a taxi when Richard and his party suddenly swelled the throng, and Richard caught sight of her head and insisted that she allowed them to give her a lift. As a kind of afterthought he asked her to go on with them to supper, and as once before in her life he refused to take no for an answer. Valentine found herself whisked away to his Chelsea flat, and she remained there until the early hours of the morning. She watched the dawn rise over the river from a balcony outside his big sittingroom window, and wished she was clever enough to capture in oils the saffron pinkness as it spread and melted into blueness, and the black shapes of the tugs and Battersea Power Station on the farther

bank, and in particular one enormous star that remained caught up in the blueness. The man who was with her, and who had kept her provided with cigarettes and a weakened version of the concoction Richard dispensed to his guests, also leaned on the balcony rail, and he seemed amused by her ambitions when she should have been yawning and thinking longingly of bed. He was a slender dark man whom Richard had introduced as Dr. Something-or-other . . . she hadn't quite caught his name. She was unwilling to let him know that she hadn't caught it, and at the same time she was certain he was a very clever man, for he had alert dark eyes and exceptionally shrewd lines at the corners of his mouth. It was a strong mouth, but humorous; his eyes—with feminine eyelashes—were humorous, too. 'I thought you had already made a name for yourself as one who did wonderful things with bits of clay,' he observed. 'One can't do everything in this world, you know, any more than one can have everything.' She glanced at him sideways with interest. 'So you caught my name,' she said. 'I'll have to admit that, I didn't catch yours.' He flicked ash from his cigarette over the balcony rail. 'You'll be just as happy if you go away from here not knowing it, I'm sure,' he said quietly. 'People one meets at affairs like this hardly ever loom up on one's horizon again. They're just ships that pass in the night.' 'Still, we might meet.' She felt mildly provoked by his calm acceptance of the fact that they were nothing more than a couple of passing ships—after all, it depended on the quality of the

impression one made at meeting whether it was likely to become a necessity that one should be met again—and he turned and studied her between his black eyelashes. She was wearing a very unspectacular evening dress, but her hair was a honey-coloured halo in the increasing light. She was afraid that her make-up needed replenishing, but she was not yet too old to be personable without layers of make-up. 'It's Gaston Lamoine,' he told her, a little curtly. Her eyebrows went up. 'Gaston? Lamoine? That's French, isn't it?' 'Clever girl,' he observed coolly. 'But don't get it into your head that I'm wholly French. I was born in this country, and my mother was English.' 'I've a friend—Roxanne Bladon—who traces her descent from the Sieur de Blaidoun, who annexed the monastic house that became her family home,' she told him. 'Interesting,' he observed. She smiled wryly. 'You're bored,' she said. 'It's been a long night, hasn't it?' And then, as if the subject was one that obsessed her: 'It's Richard's home now. Perhaps you've stayed there?' 'No,' he said. Richard came out and joined them.

'Val,' he said, 'I've got to send you home. I've got to begin packing in earnest today, and this time next week I'll be thousands of miles from here.' Despite the long night he was looking comparatively fresh and particularly elegant in his well-cut dark dinner jacket. Richard was the type of man who usually contrived to appear elegant even when he was wearing nothing but bathing shorts, or old slacks and a pullover. He had sleek brown hair like a mother blackbird's plumage, and his eyes were grey ... almost as thickly lashed as the eyes of Dr. Gaston Lamoine. He had much more regular features than Lamoine, and looking at him in the rosy dawn, with the tugs beginning to hoot on the river, and his handsome apartment still softly lit behind him and full of his chattering friends and satellites, Valentine found herself wondering how many feminine hearts had ever proved really resistant to him. Not merely was he an exceptionally wealthy man, but he had already written two successful plays, and he was shatteringly good-looking. Yes, that was the word, she thought, her heart giving an uncontrolled leap as if she was a doe that had been ( startled by something on a hillside— shatteringly! Richard smiled at her, putting his hands on her shoulders. 'You're looking charming, Val. You've discovered the way to dress, and I've always thought yours was the most beautiful hair I've ever seen.' Except Roxanne's, she said to herself. He bent forward, laughingly, and sniffed at it.

'It smells good,' he said. 'You smell good altogether ... sweet and wholesome, despite all the cigarette smoke and the hot dust of London.' He turned to Lamoine and addressed him whimsically. 'Do you know,' he said, 'I knew Valentine when she was a thin little thing with brown legs and freckles. She was about ten, and there wasn't much to commend her.' 'Freckles only attach themselves to fair skins,' Lamoine remarked rather shortly. Richard grinned at him lazily. 'But Valentine was covered in them. She was one large freckle! I used to think we'd never have an opportunity to find out what she really looked like.' He tweaked the pink lobe of an ear that was partly concealed by an end of the shining honey- coloured hair. 'When I get back you must come and stay with us, Val, at Bladon's Rock. My mother's getting rather fragile nowadays, but she always liked you staying with her. I think she found you more useful than Roxanne,' smiling with sudden tightness. 'And now I'm going to send you home in a taxi. Gaston,' appealing to his friend, 'will you see Miss Shaw home? She lives somewhere not very far from here, I believe.' In the taxi Valentine referred to a matter that had been troubling her ever since she realized who her companion was. 'You're Dr. Lamoine, the neurologist, aren't you? I know someone who was treated very successfully by you recently.' 'Oh, yes?' 'It was a woman. She had had a bad breakdown.'

'A lot of women—and men—have breakdowns nowadays. Life's a bit of a strain.' Suddenly it occurred to her that he might be accompanying Richard to Brazil. They would need a doctor on the expedition, and if he was Richard's friend he no doubt shared Richard's interests. But he shook his head when she asked him if he, too, was leaving London the following week. 'No.' There was a slight smile on his lips. 'We're not all as fortunate as Richard. Some of us have prosaically to earn a living, and we also have our commitments. Richard is free as a bird, unhampered by ties of any sort, and I don't blame him for going off into the blue when he feels like it.' 'You don't think it would be a good thing if he settled down? If he . .. married?' He shrugged. 'Marriage is the prerogative of us all, but if a man doesn't want to marry, why should he?' And he looked at her as if he defied her to supply an answer to that one. Valentine smiled wryly. She had the feeling that here was another hardened bachelor ... or was he, too, in love? As he helped her out of the cab she looked up at him, surprised when they stood on the pavement to discover that he was quite as tall as Richard, and judging by the inflexible jut of his chin much

less easy to reconcile to anything ... even love, if he wanted to reject it. 'I hope I see you again some time,' she said, not knowing quite why she said it. He looked down at her, and that tiny smile touched the corners of his lips. His eyes were dark and deep and unfathomable. Even the gleaming gold of her hair, as the morning sun cast its light over it, brought no hint of admiration into them. 'We may meet again,' he said. 'People blunder into one another sometimes. But I'm fairly certain you won't have to seek me out professionally!' Which she accepted as a compliment to the level look in her eyes, the clear tones of her skin in the morning light. She was not neurotic, she was artistic, but she hadn't an ounce of real temperament in her make-up. Perhaps that was one reason why she and Roxanne had always got on so well together.

Before she went to bed she decided against doing anything about her curtains, and the moonlight poured unhampered into her room as she lay in bed. It was a big four-poster bed that Aunt Kit had picked up at a sale, and the mattress was superbly comfortable. She ought to have drifted off to sleep at once, with that lazy slap of the tide below her window, and the utter silence that otherwise lay over everything. But she didn't. She lay thinking about her latest acquisition and her plans for improving the cottage. When the new studio was built on

she would be able to do some wonderful work. Work was so allimportant, not only because it fed and clothed her, but because without it she would be lost. What would she do? No man had yet asked her to marry him. She wasn't eager for marriage, in any case, and the fact that Richard was in the world made it impossible for her to fall in love with anyone else. She was quite sure Richard would be highly amused if he knew she was in love with him, but that couldn't alter the fact that she was in love with him. She supposed there were degrees of love, shades and colours. There was the love that inspired, and the love that wrecked. She liked to think that her love for Richard had inspired her to use her hands ... because he had once said she had clever fingers, delicate, sensitive fingers. She held them up in the moonlight and they looked pale and forlorn. The grandfather clock ticked loudly in the hall. She became aware of it for the first time. She tossed restlessly on her soft down pillows. All her life in this small cottage by the sea—this cottage that had housed her aunt, who had never married. Was that what was to happen to her? Miss Valentine Shaw, whose lovely models are fetching high prices. Well, for the moment they were, but at any moment she might lose her talent, or something might happen to her hands. She had no other talents. She was twenty- six .. . She lay and twisted and turned. She thought of Richard coming back to Bladon's Rock. Would he remember that he had invited her to stay there? Would he remember her at all? Perhaps one day they would meet in the village street, and he would say, carelessly: 'Why, it's Valentine I You're really growing up, Valentine! We're both growing up. You'd better come and look after me when I'm an old and crusty bachelor surrounded by all the relics I've brought

back from abroad ... the battered ornaments and the flint-heads, the mummified remains. Be my housekeeper!' What a thought! She fell asleep at last, and then she wakened to the endless surge and swell of the sea. But it wasn't only the surge of the sea. Something was stopping outside the house. It sounded like a car, and there was the hollow banging of car doors. There was a short murmur of voices, and then someone knocked at her own front door. Valentine leapt out of bed and crossed to the window. She could see nothing, save a red tail light disappearing in the distance. She threw on her dressing-gown as the knocking at the front door grew louder, there was a certain panic behind it, as if whoever knocked was in a state of desperate urgency. She switched on the light and made for the staircase. At the foot of the stairs she opened the front door. Roxanne stood there, clutching a suitcase. She would have known Roxanne anywhere, at any time, but she had never expected to see her looking like this. She was utterly colourless, and she appeared to be swaying slightly. 'Please, let me in, Val. I'm horribly exhausted. It was a brute of a journey.' She stood swaying in the tiny entrance hall, clutching at the newelpost of the dark oak staircase. She was unbelievably pallid, but her green eyes could still mock.

'So we've both come home to this!' she said. 'After all the fun and frolic, the acclaim and the bouquets and the flashlights, we're back where you started out—in your Aunt Kit's front parlour.'

CHAPTER THREE AN hour later Valentine had seen her settled between the sheets of her only guest-room, and had left her to sleep an exhausted sleep for as long as she needed its refreshment. She put out the light and returned to her own room, but she had no desire to climb back into her own bed. She was horrified by the change in Roxanne, and peculiarly disturbed because she had found her way down to Bladon, where her roots were. Before helping her undress she had fetched her a glass of hot milk from the kitchen, and into the hot milk she had put a little brandy. Roxanne had sniffed at the brandy and approved its inclusion, afterwards hinting broadly that another small dose of it would do her no harm. 'I had a job to find a taxi when I got to the station, and as a matter of fact I had to wait an hour before one crawled back from taking some people home after a dance, I'm glad there was a dance somewhere tonight, because otherwise I might still be waiting for means of transport. I could hardly have walked here on my own two feet, and I hadn't enough money for a hotel room.' 'You look all in,' Valentine observed, not knowing quite what to say. 'In fact, you look as if you've been ill.' Roxanne grimaced. 'I'm always ill these days. I seem to have reached a low ebb, and it doesn't seem I've got any resistance any longer. That awful little boarding-house where I've been staying was hardly the ideal background for an invalid, anyway. It smelt of cabbage and bad drainage, and the landlady was always demanding her rent.'

'Where was that?' Valentine asked, shocked by the hard note in Roxanne's voice, and the implication that she was frequently behind with her rent. 'In London.' Roxanne lay back luxuriously in one of the comfortable chairs. 'Not a corner of London I'd advise you to frequent, because, as I said, it smells, and the regular inhabitants are harpies.' 'But I don't understand, Roxanne.' Valentine felt appalled. 'I don't understand why you've sunk as low as this, and why your health is so bad.' 'Don't you?' Roxanne turned her head and looked at her out of dully gleaming green eyes, and between eyelashes that were slightly sticky with badly applied mascara. 'Well, my little one, it's a long story, and I don't feel like telling it at the moment. Do you think you could pop me into bed somewhere? You've got a couple of bedrooms, haven't you? And if you haven't I'll sleep on the couch.' 'No, no, the guest-room is all ready. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Duffy made the bed up today. We were sorting linen, and I thought we might as well have the bed made up.' 'That must have been because you were inspired,' Roxanne remarked. She smiled slightly. 'I owe poor old Duffy ten pounds. I haven't the least idea when I'll be able to repay her.' 'I wouldn't worry about that,' Valentine said hastily. 'If you're as hard up as you sound I'll give Duffy the ten pounds tomorrow.' Roxanne's smile became tinged with a faint hint of mockery.

'Of course, I suppose you're comfortably off these days. Aunt Kit's cottage, and a steady income from your models. You must feel like a female Croesus!' 'I'll unpack your case,' Valentine said, rising and carrying the shabby suitcase through into the adjoining bedroom. Although it was a warm June night she switched on the electric fire, and wondered whether she ought to put a hot water bottle into the bed. Roxanne looked as if there was no longer any warmth or comfort in her whole body. She looked colourless and attenuated, and only her eyes were as magnificent as ever. Valentine hurried upstairs to the bathroom and hastily filled a hot water bottle. When she returned she took out Roxanne's nightdress—obviously a survival of her better days—and wrapped it round the bottle. 'Are you sure you wouldn't like me to get you something to eat?' she asked, when she returned to the sitting-room. 'I could soon boil you an egg, or make an omelette, and some toast -' But Roxanne waved a dismissing hand. 'No, darling, I'm not in the least hungry. I hardly ever am these days. But I'd like another tot of the stuff you put in the hot milk. Brandy, was it? Or whisky?' 'It was brandy,' Valentine said. She disliked the way Roxanne's eyes gleamed at the mention of it. 'I'll mix you a small brandy and soda, shall I?' 'Brandy without the soda, darling. And don't make it too small, will you!' *

In the morning Mrs. Duffy arrived while Valentine was already beginning on preparations for breakfast. Mrs. Duffy looked surprised, but Valentine took her into the ground floor bedroom— keeping her fingers to her lips as she did so—and showed her the sleeping Roxanne. The old servant failed to look surprised. But she did look a little concerned. 'So you've got her now, have you?' she said. 'I suppose she was bound to come here when she heard about you inheriting the cottage. You two were always great friends, weren't you?' 'It's a long time since the days when we spent a lot of time together,' Valentine returned soberly. 'I can't remember the last occasion we actually met.' 'Well, you've got her for your first visitor now,' Mrs. Duffy observed in a toneless voice. 'And there are visitors and visitors. Some know when to take their departure, and others hang on. It's a good thing we made up that bed yesterday,' going off at a tangent. 'A good thing you've plenty of linen, and this room is on the ground floor.' Valentine closed the door carefully and drew her back into the kitchen. 'She looks ill, doesn't she?' she said, rather tautly. 'I told you she looked ill when I saw her last. She's all skin and bone, and I'd say she's half starved. But the strange thing is she hasn't much appetite—or she hadn't when she spent the night with me.' 'Do you think I ought to get the doctor to her?'

'I'd wait until she's had a rest, and perhaps you can persuade her to have a good meal today. Anyway, I'll get something nice for lunch -' reaching for her shopping basket. 'Perhaps the butcher's got a chicken.' When Roxanne woke up the sun was high in the sky, and Valentine had just made note of the fact that it was the fourteenth of June. The fourteenth ... and Richard was coming back to Bladon on the twenty-fourth. 'Darling,' Roxanne called from the bedroom. 'Since you seem to be up and about can I have a cup of tea? I'm dying for one!' Valentine took her a dainty tray, and she sat on the side of the bed while Roxanne sipped her tea. Several hours' sleep had banished that unnatural look of pallor from her cheeks, but they were still thin and her complexion was far from being the perfect complexion it had once been. It looked dry, and she had become careless with her make-up. She probably used the wrong kind, Valentine thought, a cheap kind. Her hair was swinging on her bare shoulders, and it was surprisingly red still—a gorgeous, living red. Her green eyes were bright after her prolonged sleep. 'Darling, I feel much better,' she declared. 'But then I'm back beside the sea, and I always feel better beside the sea. It does something to me. It's rejuvenating.' 'Eat your egg,' Valentine ordered. 'It's soft- boiled, as you used to like it, and the marmalade's Mrs. Duffy's own home-made.' Once more Roxanne grimaced at the mention of food.

'Do I have to?' She tapped half-heartedly at the top of the egg with her spoon. 'Oh, well, since you insist..." Then she glanced up, a little peculiarly, at her old friend. 'I've come to stay, Valentine, you realize that, don't you? I've nowhere else to go, and you can't turn me out. We used to be good friends. I'll try not to be more of a nuisance than I can help.' Valentine avoided looking at her as she urged: 'Have a piece of that toast, it's really crisp. Yes, of course you can stay, as long as you like. This cottage is mine now, and it's quite comfortable. I'm going to settle down here myself. I've grown tired of London.' 'Everyone grows tired of London.' Roxanne asked for a cigarette, and lay back against her pillows while smoke wreaths curled about her head. She surveyed the glowing tip of the cigarette thoughtfully. 'As soon as I've regained some of my strength I'll help you about the house. I can do things in the garden, and I might even do a little of the cooking .. . if Duffy'll let me,' dryly. 'She used to be quite a martinet, and I expect she still is. Does she still go up to Bladon's Rock to supervise things when the great lord and master's at home?' 'She's looking for a couple of village girls to work there when he returns later this month.' 'Oh, yes?' Undoubtedly Roxanne was interested. 'So Richard returns to shed glamour over the surrounding countryside later this month. I understand he's been in Brazil, and I've no doubt he's had a whale of a time. Richard always manages to have a whale of a

time wherever he goes. If I had a fraction of his money I'd have a whale of a time, too!' Valentine looked down at the pale pink coverlet on the bed. 'And that brings us to what you've been doing the last few years,' she remarked. 'Don't you think you ought to give me some idea of what's brought you to your present pass?' Roxanne smiled at her drearily. 'Of course, darling. I was coming to that. You shall have the whole sordid story if you want to listen.'

CHAPTER FOUR IT was not such a surprising story after all. Knowing Roxanne, Valentine didn't find it hard to understand that she grew restless every now and again, and had to do something about it. She grew tired of the stage, and she moved on to something else. She travelled, and she grew tired of travelling, and then settled down again for a short while. But always there was the urge to do something fresh, to have her boredom relieved by seeing fresh sights. If her money hadn't run out she wouldn't have come back to England. 'But money doesn't last long.' She glanced sideways at Valentine. 'And I have expensive tastes. Unfortunately I never met a millionaire with whom I could fall in love and settle down.' 'So you never thought of marrying?' 'I did think of it—once. I thought of it quite seriously. But although the man was rich I wasn't in love with him.' And Valentine knew she was referring to Richard. 'Of course, after a time, I suppose, all marriages are the same. Perhaps I should have risked it. Perhaps it would have worked out.' She pleated the top of the bed coverlet thoughtfully. Valentine stood up and walked over to the window. 'Now what we have to do is to get you well,' she said. 'You don't seem to have many clothes. Would you like me to go into Barhaven and get you some?' Roxanne's green eyes continued to dwell on her thoughtfully.

'You'll have to use your own money,' she said. 'And there's no reason why you should buy me clothes. But I am rather liable to disgrace you sooner or later if I don't have something to wear.' 'You seem to have got awfully thin, but I know the colours that suit you. I suppose you need practically everything?' 'Everything, darling,' Roxanne agreed, with one of her brittle, derisive smiles. 'And make sure the labels are Balmain or Balenciaga or someone who'll do me justice. Barhaven is bound to be right up to the minute so far as the fashion line is concerned. And don't forget, I take size four shoes, and the fittings have to be very narrow. And I'd like a supply of decent make-up if you can provide it.' 'Of course,' Valentine answered, without much expression. 'Would you like to make a list of the things you really need, and I'll do the best I can for you. You simply must have a dressing-gown.' 'In the meantime I'll borrow yours,' Roxanne said, and slid out of bed and wrapped it round her. She smiled at Valentine in a rather more hollow- eyed way. 'Thanks, Val. I was always rather fond of you, and I think you were fond of me. Now it seems we're going to be stuck with one another, for a while at least.' 'I'll do the best I can for you,' Valentine assured her, and she hoped she sounded as if she really wanted to do the best she could for her. Then she remembered that the only bus to Bar- haven left within half an hour, and she hurried off to catch it, leaving Mrs. Duffy in charge of the semi- invalid. She had some difficulty in procuring the things she wanted in Barhaven, but she did the best she could, and the thought crossed

her mind that anyone less critical than Roxanne would almost certainly derive some pleasure from her various purchases. She arranged for several of them to be delivered later in the week, but she was very nearly obscured by parcels when she returned to Bladon, and particularly satisfied with the range of cosmetics she had managed to procure for Roxanne, and which was a range she knew she would approve. Which also meant it was an expensive one, as also were all the other toilet things and the small beauty case and the enchanting dressing-gown she had bought for her old friend. Roxanne had had roast chicken for lunch, and she had even eaten the sweet Mrs. Duffy had prepared for her, and was lying comfortably in bed and looking very rested. She pounced on the things Valentine had brought back with her, and somewhat to the latter's astonishment expressed uninhibited approval. 'You've done well,' she conceded, and started feverishly to make up her face. 'That's better, isn't it?' she said, peering into the mirror half admiringly. 'I was looking a perfect hag, but now I'm not so bad. If only I could fill out a bit, and get rid of these awful mauve shadows under my eyes,' touching them distastefully. 'And I'll have to do something about my hair.' 'I could wash it for you,' Valentine offered. 'I got a bottle of shampoo.' Roxanne appeared momentarily touched. 'You think of everything, don't you?' She slipped into one of the new nightdresses, and then paraded up and down in the new dressing-gown. 'Viewed through dark glasses I could even be glamorous, couldn't I? Do you think any man would think so? A man who had once known me as I used to be, I mean?'

Valentine experienced a curious sensation deep inside her, like taking an unexpected descent in a lift. 'Richard, you mean?' she asked quietly. 'Who else?' Roxanne's eyes were mocking her again. 'I was talking of millionaires this morning, and he's the only near-millionaire I know. And I've got over my girlish dreams about love and so forth, and I'm sure Richard is nowadays much too sophisticated to bother about love. But he always admired me ... at one time he admired me so much he wouldn't leave me alone. And if I could only recapture a little of that youthful appeal ... You'll have to fatten me up with egg custards and egg nog, and perhaps we can pull the wool over Richard's eyes.' 'To what end?' Valentine asked, trying not to sound as revolted as she felt. 'You don't mean you'd marry him after all this time?' 'But of course, darling, if he's willing to cushion the rest of my life for me.' She blew cigarette smoke in Valentine's direction. 'I can still act the part of hostess and entertain his friends for him. I'll probably make him very happy once the whole thing is fixed up and I'm back at Bladon's Rock.' The sigh that escaped her was a genuine one, like something that had forced its way out into the open after being long subdued. 'You'll never know how much I've missed Bladon's Rock during the past few years. Sometimes I felt I couldn't go on if I wasn't going to see Bladon's Rock again!' The next day she sat in the garden in a long chair with a footrest, and the day after that she began to get suntanned. The garden was small but full of flowers, and the bees droned lazily as they skimmed from flower to flower. The noise of the sea, like a slow, peaceful dirge, stole up from the beach and filled the small, enclosed space.

Roxanne talked of the deep lanes that ran inland from the sea, and Valentine suspected she was full of the restless desire to explore them once more. She talked of Bladon's Rock and the rose garden, the long south terrace and the coolness of the lawns at the close of the day, and Valentine knew she was pining to be back in familiar surroundings, and that with a nature such as hers that pining could become a deliberate craving like the craving for narcotics or strong drink. Already she suspected that Roxanne had plans, carefully laid plans. And she knew that Mrs. Duffy suspected her motives for seeking refuge in the cottage. One day when Mrs. Duffy was in the midst of making an apple pie, and Valentine had gone to the village to shop, she wandered out to the kitchen and openly attempted to extract information. When Valentine returned Mrs. Duffy was waiting for her, her expression a trifle grim. 'I don't like it,' she said. 'Mr. Sterne's due to return on the twentyfourth, and that's all Miss Roxanne's waiting for. She says she's feeling better, and she's going up to call on him as soon as he arrives. She's going to get you to hire a car, because the cliff walk's too much for her as yet.' Valentine emptied her basket of the groceries she had bought, and she appeared to be checking them against her list. Mrs. Duffy came up close behind her and breathed almost fiercely down the back of her neck. 'I don't like it, Miss Val!' she repeated. 'I never thought she was good enough for Master Richard at any time, and now I know she mustn't get mixed up with him again. She looks old and tired, even if she isn't very old, and when Mr. Sterne marries he wants someone who can give him a family.'

Valentine stared at the label on a jar of chutney. 'I wouldn't worry about Mr. Sterne if I were you, Duffy,' she said. 'He'll marry when he wants to marry.' 'But not Miss Roxanne!' Valentine shrugged. 'Her health is improving daily, and she's still attractive. A lot of men might find her infinitely attractive!' 'Then men are beyond me altogether, and I'm glad I'm not a girl to get mixed up with them.' The apple pie was burning, and Mrs. Duffy lifted it out of the oven hurriedly. 'If you ask me it's those eyes of hers. Without them she wouldn't get anywhere at all! And if Mr. Sterne's weak enough to let her ride roughshod over him for the second time ...' But Valentine escaped, and in the sitting-room she found Roxanne making a few expert alterations to one of the dresses she had bought for her, and she looked up bright-eyed from her sewing to begin her attack on Valentine. 'I've learned from Mrs. Duffy that Richard's expected back on the twenty-fourth. It's so long since we met that I don't want to waste any time, and I thought it would be a good idea if you and I were there to welcome him. What do you think? Wouldn't it be neighbourly, if nothing else?' 'Neighbourly?' Valentine was appalled. 'You mean force our way into his house and wait there until he arrives?' 'Not force.' Roxanne was patient and smiling. 'Mrs. Duffy has been entrusted with the task of finding two girls to work for him, and

the caretakers arrive the day after tomorrow. We could go up and supervise things, make sure everything is as Richard would like it. You can't expect caretakers to bother about small matters like flowers in the vases, and that sort of thing. We could do that. We could inspect the larder and make sure there's enough food for him to eat.' 'I wouldn't do anything of the kind,' Valentine asserted, feeling herself go hot at the thought, 'I should think Richard would consider it impertinence.' 'Nonsense.' Roxanne continued to smile. 'For one thing, I know Richard rather better than you do, and I know he'd be delighted to have us as a kind of welcoming committee. And if you don't feel like falling in with the ideas I shall go alone. I've already ordered Jim Anderson, your local taxi-man, to pick me up tomorrow for a preliminary inspection. I found his number in the phone book.' Valentine fell back on the state of her health. 'But you can't be fit enough -' 'On the contrary, I haven't felt so well for months. It must be your good food, and the air here.' 'You've only been here three days, and you still take those tablets.' Valentine had caught her swallowing small white pills on two or three occasions when she had imagined she was alone. 'I don't know what they're for, and I'd far rather you saw a doctor and let him prescribe for you.' Roxanne's paper-white face went suddenly masklike. The brilliantly made-up line of her lips tightened.

'I don't need a doctor, and I get perfectly satisfactory results from taking my tablets. They were prescribed for me specially, and as a matter of fact they're life to me.' Valentine surveyed her with a mixture of doubt and earnestness. 'Life shouldn't, come out of a little box,' she said. 'It shouldn't be contained in tablet form. Not when you're in your early thirties, as you are.' 'Don't remind me,' Roxanne implored, her scarlet mouth twisting. 'There's nothing sounds horrider than the early thirties. By the time you've arrived at the early forties you're resigned to having said goodbye to your youth, but to be thirty-two or three ... that's the age of the has-been, the woman who has squandered her youth and has nothing to show for it. Like me.' She brooded for the rest of that day, her unnatural high spirits suddenly under eclipse, her eyes tormented as a result. But the following afternoon, when Jim Anderson's taxi drew up outside the garden gate, she was almost, but not quite, the old Roxanne, the Roxanne of ten years before, slender, elegant, with a strange vividness like the vividness of a flame. She was wearing pastelcoloured linen, and although Valentine had bought her a wide, shady hat she carried it in her hand and the richness of her shapely red head was bare to the soft afternoon breeze and the golden warmth of the sun. Her green eyes were bright, as bright as the wings of a kingfisher as it slid past them on the breeze, and she had spent such a long time with her makeup that it was well-nigh perfect. At a distance of a dozen yards she could be twenty-two instead of thirty-two. At six yards her age crept upwards a little, and when

anyone was very close to her the bloom was unmistakably nonexistent. All the same, Valentine's heart felt curiously heavy as she accompanied her into the taxi, and she wondered how Richard would feel when he saw her again. Mrs. Duffy went with them to Bladon's Rock, and while she was interviewing a couple of local girls in the kitchen Valentine and Roxanne did a careful exploration of the house. They went into every room with which they had once been familiar, and Roxanne commented audibly on the various improvements—or otherwise, according to the manner in which the innovations struck a former rightful occupant of the house—for which Richard Sterne's architect was responsible. The new wide window in the drawing-room, for instance, that provided a panoramic view of the sea, struck her as a good idea; but she was not prepared to concede as much for the dining-alcove that had been built into a corner of the huge dining-room. This, too, enabled the diners to get a wonderful view of the sea, but Roxanne preferred the dignity of dining at a long table with a glittering chandelier overhead, and several yards of carpeted space over which either a manservant or a parlour-maid had to tread with hot dishes in his or her hands. The kitchen, which was everything a modern kitchen ought to be, she praised wholeheartedly, and the extra bathrooms that had been converted out of smaller rooms. And she had to agree with Valentine that the over-all effect of the decor was wonderful. A little inclined to shout aloud that it was a man who was responsible for it, but otherwise perfect.

She was fingering the flowing folds of satin damask at one of the windows and mentally assessing the cost of the material per yard when Mrs. Duffy came agitatedly in from the kitchen, and announced that a telegram had just been received, and Richard and his party were arriving at six o'clock that evening. Valentine's breath caught, but Roxanne merely looked up with a gleam in her eyes. 'Good,' she said. 'Then we're here at the right time, for we can lend a hand at putting the finishing touches to the guest-rooms, and so on. And some flowers must be brought in for the drawing-room and the dinner table. I'll go and have a word with the gardener and see what I can get out of him.' But Valentine stopped her. 'Roxanne, you must see that we're not wanted here now. We must go. The preparations for Richard and his visitors are nothing to do with us. We shall only be in the way, and in any case, we haven't any right here.' 'No?' The expression of Roxanne's green eyes scarcely altered. Her tone was extraordinarily complacent. 'But I'm afraid I don't agree with you. It's a case of many hands making light work, and that Jenkins couple, the new caretakers, can't handle everything, and Duffy's already as flustered as an old hen, and won't be much help. Go upstairs and put out the linen for the beds, and I'll see what I can do with the gardener.' She walked away over the lawns with much of her old grace and purposefulness, and Valentine watched her cool green linen disappearing into the shrubbery. Her polished red head was well held, she was in her element for the first time for years, and Valentine felt helpless. Nevertheless, she accompanied Mrs. Duffy

upstairs to the vast linen cupboards, and while Mrs. Duffy ripped off the protective dust covers and flung open windows she counted out pillowcases and matching sheets and towels, and carried them through into the rooms where they were to be put to use. Richard was bringing three guests with him, and that meant four beds to be made up, and four bathrooms to be inspected. Long before they were through Mrs. Duffy was breathing agitatedly and protesting at the unfairness of such an invasion, but Valentine was preoccupied with thoughts of Roxanne, and she made her way down to the dining- room to find her friend coolly getting on with a centrepiece of roses that were reflected in the polished surface of the lovely rosewood table. She looked up with a smile as Valentine entered, and asked her whether she had seen her floral arrangements in the drawing-room. 'The gardener was most unhelpful, but I told him I'd got to have as many flowers as I wanted, and I just wore down his resistance. If I employed him he'd receive daily instructions to send flowers up to the house.' 'I've no doubt Richard will have a housekeeper or someone of the sort who will do those sort of things.' Valentine replied. She started to gather up some of the debris, and therefore she missed Roxanne's mildly speculative glance as it rested on her. 'What Richard needs is a wife,' she said. Valentine straightened herself. She felt suddenly acutely uneasy, uneasy for Roxanne as well as for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with Roxanne. 'Roxanne,' she said, moving nearer to her, and speaking almost warningly, 'the last time I saw Richard he—he seemed to have a

lot of women friends. Men change, you know, they grow adult and put away all the weakness of their youth. Their outlook broadens, and they get fresh interests. It happens to all of us. Even you— you've changed. Richard will have changed.' But Roxanne continued to look complacent. 'Not the Richard who once offered to make over everything he possessed to me if only I would marry him! Who was willing to be a beggar at his own table ... my table! I could have been mistress here long, long ago if I'd wanted to be, but that wasn't what I wanted ... then.' Valentine studied her and her uneasiness grew. Already Roxanne was beginning to look tired again. She staggered to a chair and sat down on it, looking white and drawn. There was something infinitely pathetic about her, as if she was preparing for an act that was beyond her, and she refused to admit it. 'What's the time?' she asked. 'Richard should soon be here.' 'But we're not staying here until Richard arrives,' Valentine exclaimed, horrified by the bare idea. 'I'll ring for Jim Anderson to come up at once.' 'Too late,' Roxanne declared, as a sleek black car slid past the window, and was followed by another sleek grey car. 'They're here. Richard is here!' She looked amused by Valentine's consternation. 'Darling, don't be absurd. Richard is a friend, an old friend. He'll be delighted to see the pair of us. I think we've timed things beautifully.'

But Valentine couldn't agree with her. And all at once she was so afraid for Roxanne—and herself —that she wanted to seize her friend by the arm and hurry her out through the glass door to the terrace. Only Roxanne wasn't allowing herself to be hurried away anywhere. 'Let's go into the hall to greet them,' she said, and stood up a little unsteadily. For the first time Valentine saw her eyes looking dark and inscrutable, like secret mountain tarns; but her chin was firm and her mouth looked taut with resolution. If only she had been smiling and fresh as she was on arrival it wouldn't have mattered. Valentine thought, rather wildly. But she had been on her feet too much and she was looking every one of her years. She had added half a dozen years to her age.

CHAPTER FIVE RICHARD was the first to appear in the hall, looking tanned and fit and even younger than when Valentine saw him last. Obviously his trip to Brazil had agreed with him, and even if it hadn't been a tremendous success it had done things for him that an easy life in London could never have done. It had hardened him physically and put an alert look in his eyes. Perhaps the look was too alert— too expectant, too shrewd, too critical. But when it lighted on Valentine it simply dissolved into an astonished smile. 'Why, the little Valentine!' he exploded. 'Now, the very last thing I expected was to find you here! Is this a reception committee?' He took both hands and squeezed them hard. He was obviously genuinely pleased to see her .. . but he didn't even notice Roxanne. It was true that, in the excitement and slight confusion of the moment, she had become somewhat mixed up with Mrs. Duffy and the new caretakers, both of whom were in the hall, and for some reason which she herself probably understood she had slipped a pair of dark glasses over her eyes. But, years ago, dark glasses could not have disguised Roxanne, or offered her any concealment. Richard would have sensed her presence even if her flaming red hair didn't give her away. But now he was intent on discovering what Valentine was doing there, and while Valentine was doing her best to supply him with a few convincing answers the other members of his party arrived in the hall, and the first one to reach his side and reproach him for leaving something particularly prized behind in his flat was the loveliest girl Valentine had ever seen in her life.

She was not unlike Roxanne when she was younger, only her hair was burnished rather than red, and she had deep jewel-like blue eyes instead of green ones. And her complexion was so spectacular that Valentine wanted to gasp ... surely the loveliest, most perfect complexion ever bestowed on any female! When Richard introduced her he provided some sort of a clue. Miss Dana Jorgensen, a Scandinavian. Just to look at her made Valentine think of ice-clear distances and mountains withdrawing into the clouds, still sheets of water, cool larch forests. She was as slender as a young larch tree, and yet all that was necessary in the way of feminine allure was there. Her hand on Richard's arm was possessive, her voice plaintive and fretful. 'Richard, that new shagreen beauty box you gave me last week ... we've left it behind at the flat!' Her full, scarlet bottom lip pouted, and she even looked as if she might dissolve into tears. 'It was too bad of you to let me come away without it. You know how much I love it.' 'Darling, don't be trifling. We'll send for it,' Richard answered. Then he introduced her. 'Miss Dana Jorgensen, my fiancée. Dana, this is a very very old friend, Miss Valentine Shaw.' Valentine felt as if something had hit her between the eyes, but recovered from the shock in time to be presented to Miss Jorgensen's mother, and to recognize Dr. Gaston Lamoine as the fourth member of the party. Automatically she held out her hand to him, saw one of his dark eyebrows lift, and then hastened to rectify a dreadful omission— the fact that Roxanne had not yet been recognized or presented to anyone. 'Richard,' she got out, in insistent tones, 'here is someone you know better than me, someone you haven't seen for a long time.'

Roxanne put a hand to her eyes and removed her dark glasses. With cheeks as white as chalk she stood gazing at Richard, gazing at him with burning, reproachful, wounded eyes. Richard's own face seemed to freeze, and for fully ten seconds while he said nothing at all it was obvious that he, too, had received a shock. Then he went across to Roxanne and examined her carefully, taking in every detail of her appearance— Valentine was agonizingly aware of this—and at last he spoke. 'You've been ill? Recently?' She nodded. 'I haven't been very fit for about a year.' Dr. Lamoine had somehow edged forward, and he, too, was looking at Roxanne. As soon as she was able to wrench her look away from Richard's compelling gaze Roxanne looked round and saw him, and under the eyes of all of them she seemed to go to pieces. 'You here?' she said. 'You!' The last word was an unbelieving whisper, and for the first time in her private life— although she had probably done it more than once on the stage— she fainted dead away. She did it with a drama and a thoroughness that she could never have achieved on the stage, sinking into a heap in the middle of the hall while they all stood round her, and only Dr. Lamoine was quick enough to prevent her hitting her head against the highly polished floorboards. He managed to get an arm round her shoulders and under her head, so that she lay with her face turned slightly towards him against his shoulder, and he swung her up in his arms

and carried her through the open door of the drawing- room to the nearest settee. He spoke over his shoulder to Richard. 'Some brandy, please! And if you've got a room she can occupy tell someone to get it ready.' So Roxanne, who had spent the afternoon arranging flowers, was the first to occupy one of the newly decorated bedrooms, and the golden light of the westering June sun was filling it when she finally became aware of where she was. The whole house was in nothing less than an uproar, the kitchen quarters a hive of nervous activity and echoing with agitated instructions repeated in nervous voices. Mrs. Duffy collected all the hot water bottles she could find and filled them, the new houseman's wife unearthed extra blankets, one of the girls hired that afternoon coped with the demands of Mr. Sterne's two feminine guests, the new houseman himself carried drinks to the library where Richard paced up and down, and upstairs Dr. Lamoine issued a whole set of instructions on his own account, and Valentine did her best to carry them out. Between them they got Roxanne into bed, borrowing a nightdress from Mrs. Jorgensen, and Mrs. Duffy placed her hot water bottles at strategic points and helped to massage Roxanne's long, thin, colourless hands. Her fit of unconsciousness lasted a long time, and even when she began slowly to recover from it she didn't seem able to recognize Valentine bending over her. She looked past her at the slight, dark figure of the doctor who was standing at the foot of the bed and studying her fixedly, and she tried to say something that wouldn't quite pass her lips.

Valentine, remembering how completely she had crumpled up when she first saw him, looked anxiously at him over her shoulder. 'Do you think it would be better if she didn't— didn't see you for a while?' she suggested. But he ignored her and moved closer to his patient and took her wrist. 'Better?' he asked, and his voice was extraordinarily gentle. 'I think you are beginning to feel a little better, aren't you?' Roxanne answered him huskily. 'I suppose I am. But I'm not at all sure what I'm doing, or where I am.' 'You're in Richard Sterne's house, Bladon's Rock,' Lamoine told her, speaking very distinctly, and he sat down on the side of the bed and held her green eyes with his own—or that was the impression the watching Valentine received. Roxanne's glance might have slid away from him, but he held it— held it deliberately. 'You had a bad fainting fit, and we put you to bed. I don't think you'll be able to return with Miss Shaw to her cottage tonight, so I should settle down and make yourself comfortable if I were you. Go to sleep. You can do with a lot of sleep.' His fingers were still on her wrist, and Valentine received a second impression that she tried to wriggle her hand free. 'I do feel rather tired,' she admitted, in a weak voice. 'Then take my advice and go to sleep.'

Roxanne managed to free her glance from his, and she looked round at Valentine, still standing close beside her. 'Sorry to involve you in this, Val,' she said barely audibly. 'But I suppose I did too much ...' Then, as if quite a lot was coming back to her, 'He did call her his fiancée, didn't he? The pretty girl with the Scandinavian name?' Outside the door Valentine looked at the doctor with a leading question in her eyes, and he answered with a slight, shrugging movement of his shoulders. 'She's not at all well. In fact, she's really very ill. I'm afraid she'll have to remain where she is for a few days, possibly longer.' 'But this house is not a nursing home,' Valentine said quickly. 'Richard may object to having a sick person quartered on him.' 'I gather he's known her some time, so I shouldn't think he'd object.' Valentine looked directly up at him, and his dark eyes were regarding her shrewdly. 'And you can't be expected to treat her, as you're a visitor yourself. Oughtn't we to get the local man?' 'I was going to suggest that we get him, not because I'm a visitor, but because I think it would be more ethical.' 'Shall I look in and see him on my way home? I do know him quite well, as a matter of fact.' 'No, I'll have a word with him myself. I expect his number's in the telephone book.'

'I can give it to you.' They moved a little way along the corridor, towards the head of the staircase. Suddenly she turned to him and spoke as if the words were jerked out of her. 'You know her, don't you? I mean, you've met before?' 'Have we?' The annoying dark eyes were gazing down at her, neither acknowledging the fact that they too, had met before, or admitting that he and Roxanne were on terms of familiarity that extended beyond this afternoon. 'Well, now, I wonder why you think that?' She looked up at him almost indignantly. 'It was after she saw you that she fainted. She said "You here? You!" and collapsed.' 'Very dramatic, I'll admit that,' he agreed. 'But by no means conclusive if you're trying to saddle me with an acquaintanceship I'm not prepared to acknowledge. People who are physically in a very poor condition often imagine things, and when the imagination gets out of hand all sorts of things can result. Miss Bladon said nothing about recognizing me after she recovered consciousness, did she?' 'No, but I think that was because something passed between you. You didn't exactly order her silently not to recognize you, but through mental telepathy you impressed it on her that it would be wise to do so.' He suddenly started to laugh softly, and leaning against the wall and turning to confront her fully he looked so amused that she flushed with resentment. The flush intrigued him, and his eyes dwelt on the clear skin behind which the colour was rising, and it was quite obvious he took in further details of her appearance, such as the way she wore her hair and the simplicity of her cotton

dress. It was an ordinary, off-the-peg bright blue dress, but it did something for her hazel-brown eyes and the soft gold of her hair. Its very simplicity emphasized the vulnerable something in her eyes that had intrigued more than one man who would have been willing to get to know her better. 'I think that's funny,' Dr. Lamoine declared, 'I think you are unconsciously funny, Miss Shaw.' 'Ships that pass in the night,' Valentine reminded him, indignant hazel sparks struck from her eyes. 'Do you remember, Doctor? When I suggested we might meet again you said hastily that it was most unlikely. But in spite of that we have met again.' He continued to lean against the wall, and his eyes continued to dance. 'Was I so ungallant as to make a remark like that? I must have been feeling rather like the wrong end of the day. It was rather early in the morning, wasn't it?' 'So you remember that?' 'Oh, yes, I remember everything perfectly—including the boring number of people present who used up all the oxygen in Richard's sitting-room, the poor quality of the play we were forced to watch during the early part of the evening, and the way you enthused about the tugs and the river. It was almost childish ... one of the nicer aspects of childhood.' 'Thank you, Doctor,' she returned bleakly. 'You have nothing to thank me for,' he assured her. 'Only you mustn't ever deceive yourself about my memory. It's an excellent memory.'

'I'm sure it is,' she said quietly. 'As good as Roxanne's, anyway.' Only this she added under her breath, so he might not have caught it. Downstairs, when she heard Richard was in the library, she went straight to it and tapped on the door. He was still pacing up and down, his face peculiarly expressionless, his brows knit. He looked up quickly as she entered. 'I'm going back to the cottage to fetch a few of Roxanne's things,' she said. 'I'm afraid you'll have to put up with her for a few days, Richard.' 'How is she?' he asked, and Dr. Lamoine, who was behind Valentine, answered for her. 'She can't be moved. In any case, that room is well tucked away, and she won't interfere with your plans for your guests, Richard.' 'I'm not thinking about that aspect of the matter,' Richard said, with a slight tightening of his lips. 'I'd like to get the local man to see her,' Dr. Lamoine added. 'I can't accept responsibility for someone who isn't a patient of mine.' 'Of course.' Richard appeared a trifle distracted. 'Use this phone, or there's one in the hall, and another in the butler's pantry.' 'I'll use the one in the butler's pantry,' Dr. Lamoine decided. 'If that fellow I saw on arrival is the butler he won't have discovered the way to it yet.' 'He's new,' Richard said.

As soon as they were alone Valentine offered sincere apologies to Richard. 'If only we hadn't come here today this wouldn't have happened. Roxanne seemed to be making progress, but she was so anxious to be here when you arrived.' She tried to catch a glimpse of his expression, but he had turned away from her. 'I can't think why she was so anxious ... and in any case, we haven't any right here.' Richard crushed out a cigarette he had just lighted in an ashtray at his elbow, and took another from a cedarwood box. There was no tone at all in his voice as he asked: 'How long has Roxanne been with you? I didn't know anyone knew where she was.' 'She came here about a week ago ... came to my cottage. I could see she wasn't at all well.' 'And you've been looking after her?' 'We've decided to live together. She hasn't any money. It's the sensible thing.' Richard turned, and she was amazed by the sudden smile he directed at her—a warm, appreciative, almost an intimate smile. He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. 'How Valentine-ish!' he said. 'You were always a nice little thing, Val.' She coloured brilliantly at the compliment, as if it took her aback. 'I—I suppose I ought to congratulate you on your—your engagement,' she stammered.

His whole expression altered at once. He looked remote and withdrawn. 'You needn't,' he said. 'But a man has to marry some time, and I've decided that now is the time. My mother is always talking about grandchildren, and things like that, and—well I've decided to humour her. In any case, it's high time I settled down. I've wandered about the world enough.' Yes, Valentine thought numbly, he had done a lot of wandering since Roxanne had turned him down. But grandchildren! Children who would bear his name. If it was only a question of children had he to pick on someone who looked exactly like Roxanne? Or very nearly as Roxanne had looked when she was twenty-two. Valentine's heart ached so much as she turned towards the door that it hurt her. It made her throat ache. Richard thought she was tired, and moved swiftly to her side. 'I'll drive you to the cottage. My car is still on the drive.' 'No, it won't take me long to walk.' 'Nonsense!' He took her by the arm and propelled her outside the room. 'Come back and stay here yourself, Val. Roxanne will like to have you, in fact all of us will.' But she shook her head almost fiercely. 'No, I have things to do at the cottage. But I'll come up every day, of course, and help look after her.'

As they passed the foot of the stairs Dana Jorgensen came running down them. She was already dressed for the evening, and she sparkled as Roxanne had always loved to sparkle when she was about to go on parade. She caught at Richard's arm and halted him. 'Darling, where are you going? You promised to show me the house, but I couldn't find you. Mother and I have been waiting in my room upstairs. You haven't changed.' 'No, but I'll change as soon as I get back after driving Miss Shaw to her cottage.' He smiled at her perfunctorily, and then as she obviously recognized that it was a perfunctory smile took her by the chin and squeezed it. He implanted a kiss between her delicately made-up eyebrows. 'Things have been hectic here, Miss Bladon isn't so good.' 'Will she have to stay here?' There was distaste on Dana's face as she looked up at him, the distaste of the young for any sort of sickness. And to her Roxanne had appeared old and uninteresting. 'What was she doing here, anyway?' 'She was here because this is her old home—she's a member of the Bladon family—and she wanted everything to be nice for us when we arrived.' He enunciated clearly, patiently, as if she was a child, but behind his outward patience Valentine sensed a feeling of impatience and even a mild degree of annoyance. 'Be a good girl and amuse yourself until I get back. Gaston will get you a drink.' For Gaston had emerged from the butler's pantry, and started to cross the hall on his way to the stairs. He bowed a trifle mockingly in front of Dana. 'Of course I'll look after her until you get back, Richard. What man would refuse such an opportunity?' He looked round, with an

indolent gleam in his eyes, at Valentine. 'Unless you would prefer that I drive Miss Shaw to her cottage?' But Valentine clutched impulsively at Richard's arm. Dr. Lamoine was too much of a blank page for her to cope with at that hour of the day, after an orgy of bed-making and putting the house to rights, and she felt she couldn't endure him for another possible hour. 'There's really no need for either of you to come with me,' she said, but Richard's fingers closed firmly about her arm and he led her away. 'Don't be a foolish infant. Of course I'm coming with you. Dana will survive in Gaston's care. He's a doctor, a fashionable one. Lovely ladies are a speciality of his!'

CHAPTER SIX THE next morning, Dr. Lamoine's sleek grey car drew up outside Valentine's cottage. She had just finished washing up her breakfast things, for Mrs. Duffy was still up at Bladon's Rock putting the two girls she had engaged through their paces, and was wearing slacks and an old pullover against the sharp tang in the salty air. Dr. Lamoine, in a pale grey suit and wearing an impeccably tied tie, slid out from his seat behind the wheel and approached her slowly up the garden path. She had heard the car stop and had the front door open immediately, and he realized that she was anxious about her friend. 'Miss Bladon had a good night,' he told her. 'She slept well.' 'With the help of a sedative?' she suggested. He nodded. 'The local chap agreed with me that she needs doping a bit. She's been living on her nerves for months, and now that she's back in her old home she seems to have given up fighting whatever it was she has been fighting. She's even perfectly resigned to remaining where she is.' 'But she can't do that, it's Richard's house!' Valentine was aghast. 'What about his fiancée, and her mother? What will they think?' He shrugged. 'Does it matter? They're not likely to catch anything, the house is large, there seems to be a lot of domestics scurrying about in all directions. It won't hurt Richard if Miss Bladon has to stay with

him for a bit, and it won't hurt her because I gather it's the only place in the world where she really wants to be.' Valentine studied the flagged path that led up to the cottage, and as she seemed completely preoccupied he interrupted her thoughts. 'May I come in? This is a nice little cottage ... cosy. I like your flowers, and I like the thick walls and the small windows set in them. Do they all provide you with a view of the sea?' 'The ones at the back look out on to a garden that's rather enclosed. But it's a nice garden if you want to be alone.' She stood aside from the doorway. 'Do come in, Doctor. I'm afraid I'm not awfully tidy yet, but I've got to do all the housework myself this morning.' 'It looks very tidy to me,' he commented, as she led him into the small sitting-room. She could tell he was a collector when his eyes brightened at the sight of her jade cats and the Buhl-fronted cabinet. 'These are nice,' he remarked, examining one of the cats. 'Valuable. I hope you fasten your windows at night ... and this,' picking up one of her own models—the head of a small boy that she had had coated with bronze, 'this is really beautiful.' His eyebrows ascended as he met her eyes. 'Your own work?' 'Yes,' she answered. 'You are an artist,' he told her. He went round the room examining other things, but she tried to get him back to the important subject that should be preoccupying both their minds since he was there at all—and she didn't flatter herself that he had come to see her. He who regarded human contacts as 'passing ships'. 'Doctor,' she said.

He turned at once, smiling one-sidedly. 'Since we met at a party where the drinks were flowing, and not in the clinical atmosphere of my consulting-room or anywhere like that, don't you think you could make it Gaston?' he asked. She hesitated. 'When I suggested that we might meet again you didn't seem anxious that I should be proved right,' she retorted. He laughed in his soft, vaguely annoying way. 'Oh, come! I didn't mean to be offensive, and it was very much on the cards that we didn't meet again. The chances of our meeting again were, I estimated, at that time very remote.' 'You did say I wouldn't be likely to need your professional services, but if you'd wanted to see me again you could have asked for my telephone number, or something of the sort.' He went up to her and took her by the shoulders and looked down at her quizzically. 'If you continue along these lines I shall begin to suspect that the impression I made at our first meeting was quite remarkable,' he told her. She flushed—and oh, how she hated her inability to control a schoolgirlish blush on occasions—and averted her face from him. She realized that she must appear to him very transparent, and in all honesty she couldn't understand why it annoyed her so extremely that he hadn't wanted to see her again. It was the same sort of annoyance one felt when, after more than one introduction, someone forgot one's name ... or so she told herself.

'Don't be absurd,' she said, wresting her shoulders out of his grasp. Then she carefully avoided meeting his eyes. 'I don't suppose we shall see much more of one another, because a busy man like you won't be staying in an isolated spot like this for long.' 'As a matter of fact, I propose to stay for a week at least. I've earned a holiday, and I like the sea. I like Bladon's Rock!' 'But you won't be looking after Roxanne? You'll let Dr. Eustace do that.' 'Dr. Eustace and I will keep an eye on her together. We're agreed about that. He's a G.P., and I'm a neurologist. Your friend's trouble isn't all physical weakness.' Valentine looked at him with apprehensive eyes. 'She takes tablets—a lot of them,' she said. 'I've never been able to find out what they are or exactly what they're for, but I've hated to see her falling back on them so many times a day. Do you know what they're for, Dr. Lamoine?' 'Gaston,' he corrected her smoothly. 'And I wouldn't worry about tablets, Valentine. Your friend is receiving proper attention at last.' 'I'm glad of that,' she said almost humbly, as she accompanied him back to the door. The slight mistiness of the morning had evaporated, and already it was another bright day. The sea lay and shimmered like diamond dust in the sunshine, and the sky had a hot look about it, which promised considerable heat around about the noon hour. Valentine thought wistfully of Richard's fast motor boat cutting through the silken warmth of the water, and a picnic hamper being opened in the dimness of a nearby cove with fascinating caves running inland

from the sea. But she had to do some laundry work for herself and Roxanne, and after that she must prepare a meal for herself and then visit Roxanne in the afternoon and sit with her. She ripped off her sweater, and her boyish silk shirt clung to her shapely if somewhat inadequate form. 'I expect you've all been down for a bathe this morning,' she said. 'Richard is keen on bathing.' 'Richard is, but Miss Jorgensen isn't,' he replied. 'However, he's promised her a drive this afternoon. I have a special message for you from Richard. You're to pack a suitcase and come back with me to Bladon's Rock.' For one instant the invitation excited her, and then she shook her head. 'That would be most unfair to Richard, when he already has Roxanne inflicted on him. Besides, I can't very well shut up the cottage ...' 'Then you're to come back with me to lunch.' She looked at him. He was studying her with a slight curve to his lips and an odd expression in his eyes. He laid a hand gently on her shoulder. 'I'll wait for you while you change,' he said. 'I'll sit in your garden and admire the hollyhocks.'

Roxanne was lying very comfortably on her pillows when Valentine saw her about an hour before lunch. She was looking

very rested and her eyes were clear, but there was a fragility about her that wrung Valentine's heart when she stood beside the bed. She had never seen her looking as fragile before, like a leaf come to rest after a storm. She was wearing one of the attractive bed-jackets Valentine had bought for her, and her own personal things were scattered about the room, making it her room. She had her own private bathroom adjoining, with lots of fluffy yellow towels to match her yellow t silk curtains and bedhead, and somehow the colour didn't fight with her hair or make her look sallow. 'Of course, they should have put me in the room with the all-white decor, or that particularly sumptuous one with the black carpet and the pale lavender hangings,' she remarked, with a spark of dryness in her green eyes. 'But I understood Miss Jorgensen has the white room, and her mother is in possession of the one with the black carpet. However, this is nice and bright, and I have my favourite view of the sea.' She lay looking at the window through which the sunlight was streaming in, and for a moment her expression was wistful, sad. 'Has Richard been to see you?' Valentine asked. 'Oh, yes.' Instantly she brightened. 'He came to see me last night, and early this morning. He was so nice and kind. He says I'm to stay here for as long as I want to stay, and anything I need he'll get me. He couldn't have been kinder.' Valentine deliberately avoided her eyes. 'I suppose you haven't had a word yet with his fiancée?'

'No.' Far from looking upset, Roxanne appeared mildly amused. 'But she'll come and see me some time, I expect. She looks a bit like me, doesn't she? Poor Richard! He tried to console himself with the next best thing.' Valentine felt she ought to warn her. If she imagined for one moment that Richard, having got himself engaged to one girl, would discard her in favour of his old love if that love would take him back, then she was barking up entirely the wrong tree. Valentine had received the impression— whether rightly or wrongly—that Richard had put his past behind him, and his engagement to Miss Jorgensen was entirely serious. He was probably not the least bit in love with her, but he intended to marry her. He had been in love with Roxanne, but that was in the past. A man couldn't spend all his life mourning because his one love turned him down .. . not when he was a man with a position to maintain, a house and a flat to be run, and a mother desirous of grandchildren. And even the most devoted love grew stale in time, when it wasn't returned, and there was nothing to nurture it. Valentine was still wondering how best to put this aspect of the matter to Roxanne without upsetting her when Roxanne, wandering away from the subject of Richard, got on to the subject of Gaston Lamoine. 'He's obviously very clever,' she said. 'Of course, I've heard of him. He made a name for himself several years ago when he treated a famous politician successfully.' 'You've ... never met him before?' Valentine asked, watching her. Roxanne smiled into her eyes. Once more she looked amused.

'Not that I can remember. Why? Did he say that he'd met me before?' 'No. Only just before you fainted yesterday you spoke to him. You said, "You here?" and it seemed to upset you.' A screen came down over Roxanne's eyes. She seemed suddenly to tire of conversation, and turned on her pillows. 'If you don't mind, sweetie,' she said, 'I'll get a spot of sleep. The one thing I always feel I want to do nowadays is sleep .... if I get the opportunity.' Valentine left her and descended to the ground floor of the house. She ran into Dana in the hall, coming in from the garden in a pair of brief shorts and a sun-top, and the two greeted one another briefly. It was quite obvious to Valentine that Richard's fiancée, while not perhaps exactly resenting her and Roxanne's presence in the house, was not prepared to welcome them. Which was not entirely unnatural when neither Roxanne nor Valentine had any real right in the house. At lunch Valentine was placed next to Dr. Lamoine, and he, too, had changed into casual slacks and an open-necked shirt. He was already very brown—Valentine wondered where he had picked up his suntan, or whether it was partly natural since he was so dark— and she couldn't help thinking him an exceptionally attractive man with his feminine eyelashes and his intensely masculine mouth and slightly ruthless chin. 'You talked about bathing this morning,' he said. 'I was wondering whether you would allow me to pick you up tomorrow morning and go bathing with me? I'm sure you know of an ideal spot where we don't have to bump into the others.'

Valentine looked at him in mild surprise. 'But why don't we all go bathing together? I mean, if the others wished it ...' He looked along the table at Dana, who was clutching her fiancée's arm even though they were at lunch, and one of his eyebrows rose. His eyes gleamed as they met Valentine's. 'Sometimes people like to be alone,' he said. 'Engaged couples, for instance.' And Valentine flushed brilliantly. 'Yes, of course,' she said hastily. 'How silly of me. I'll—I'll be happy to go bathing with you if you don't mind the trouble of picking me up.' 'What time do you usually get up in the morning?' 'About seven o'clock.' 'Good. I'll pick you up at half-past six—half an hour earlier than you usually get up—and if you're not awake I'll throw stones at your window. Which, by the way, is your window? The one above the sitting-room?' 'Yes. There's only one bedroom upstairs. The other room is a bathroom. It's a very tiny cottage.' He smiled at her whimsically. 'It struck me that it had everything that's necessary,' he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN IN the morning she was awakened by a shower of gravel flung against her window, and she opened the window and looked out. Dr. Lamoine was waiting for her. He was in a bathrobe, and he had a towel rolled up under his arm. Valentine withdrew her head, and in a very short space of time she joined him on the garden path. She, too, had put on a terrytowelling kind of robe, and beneath it she wore a trim swimsuit and she carried her cap in her hand. She felt as if the early morning had caught her unawares, and was still blinking sleep from her eyes when she joined the doctor on the path. He smiled at her and recommended that she went to bed earlier, whereupon she protested that she had been sitting up late the night before putting the finishing touches to a piece of modelling, and he smiled more whimsically and said she should cut out modelling. 'I have to earn my living,' she returned shortly. He glanced at her sideways under his thick eyelashes—a trick he had which she had noticed before. 'What about marriage?' he asked. 'Don't you plan to cut out earning a living one day and take a husband instead, who can do it for you?' She ran forward towards the path which led down to the beach. 'It's too early in the day to discuss such a subject as future husbands,' she remarked, and he laughed and looked at her still more whimsically.

'True,' he agreed. 'Husbands are for the night time rather than the day time, aren't they? During the day they're toiling to support the little wives; at night For one moment her brown glance, and his dark one met and held, and then she felt covered in confusion. She slipped off her bathing wrap and ran down to the edge of the sea, and the next instant she had waded out and was swimming away from him strongly. They were both strong swimmers, and he was a magnificent one. It was a perfect morning, with just the right amount of warmth at that early hour to make the sea feel warm, and to take away the chill that had attacked exposed limbs on the way to the water's edge. Valentine half closed her eyes and struck out towards an unseen horizon, and as always she felt that she could never tire and that this delicious freedom of movement was the most wonderful thing she had taken advantage of in the whole of her twenty-six years. From somewhere not far away she heard Lamoine call to her. 'You shouldn't exhaust yourself at the beginning of a swim. You're not planning to reach the other side o£ the Channel, are you?' She turned her head over her shoulder and shook the drops from her lashes. 'Perhaps,' she called back. 'Then I'll make the trip with you.' He swam alongside, and then he was ahead of her. He had a wonderful overarm stroke, and she emulated it furiously as she sought to prevent him outdistancing her altogether. Despite his warning that she shouldn't exhaust herself she knew he was deliberately presenting her with a challenge, and she wasn't going

to allow a mere male who was not nearly as familiar with these waters as she was to have the satisfaction of patronizing her efforts when later they returned to the beach, and perhaps offering to teach her a few of his own tricks. So she exerted every ounce of strength she had, and all her will, and closed the gap between them with a rapidity that filled her with exhilaration. Pantingly she called to him, over the sparkling blue water: 'Beat you to the island!' 'It's too far off,' he called back. He looked back and saw that she was straining like a seal, and abruptly he swung about and struck out towards her, and it was then that Valentine knew she was beginning to be attacked by cramp. Her left foot was full of agonizing pins and needles, and the calf of her right leg was starting to play up. Terrified, as she always was, by the commencement of cramp, she flopped over on to her back to rest herself, and also to indicate what had happened to her. 'All right,' Dr. Lamoine called. 'I'll take you in.' He ordered her to obey everything he said to her, and above all not to attempt to help herself. While the sun beat down strongly upon them and the day got into its stride he swam back to the shore, taking Valentine with him, and she had so much confidence in him that she was never even tempted to defy his instructions. Once they reached the beach he lifted her out of the water and bore her up it, and then he laid her down on the warm sand and knelt beside her. In the water she had started to turn blue, but now it was fading from her lips and her colour was coming back. She was shivering violently, and he wrapped her in a towel and then gently massaged

the affected parts until her circulation was restored and her strained muscles ceased behaving like pieces of worn-out elastic. She smiled up at him crookedly as he offered her a towel to dry her hair, still keeping her head in the crook of his arm. 'It's always a good thing to have a doctor on hand,' she observed. 'Particularly when you overreach yourself.' 'Why did you?' he asked, frowning back at her. His arm was strong and warm, and although the sea water was running down from his thick black hair and wetting her afresh she seemed to derive a sensation of warmth from him, and hadn't the faintest desire to draw away from him, although the fact that she was now recovered left her with no excuse for remaining where she was. 'I don't know,' she answered, studying him with curiosity. 'Except that I hate to be beaten!' 'By a mere man,' his lips curving. 'A ship that should have gone onward and been well over the horizon by this time.' She made a movement to draw away from him, but his arm refused to release her. Their eyes clung together as if some outside influence had them temporarily mesmerized, and he ran a finger down one side of her cheek as if he couldn't resist the impulse to test the quality of her cool, damp skin. 'I had a feeling that we would meet again,' he said, and he spoke almost jerkily. 'So did I.' But her voice was just a little wondering. 'And now that we have you mustn't let me tempt you into doing rash things, such as getting out of your depth out there,' indicating the heaving ocean. 'You might do that once too often!'

'I know,' she said soberly. He put a hand under her chin and lifted it. He smiled at her. 'However, you're all right now.' And then he bent, and she felt his mouth lightly covering hers, and for perhaps a couple of seconds it remained there without exerting any pressure at all, until all at once it was pressing hard, and her instinct was to return the fierceness and the utterly unexplainable desire to extract pleasure from the taste of salt and the incredible sweetness of a pair of yielding lips. And then he was standing up and saying, shortly : 'Sorry! I shouldn't have done that. You'd better get into that robe of yours, and I'll take you back to the cottage. Unless you'd like to breakfast at Bladon's Rock?' She shook her head, the wet fair hair swinging against her neck. 'No, I'll go back to the cottage.' But halfway to the cottage he stopped and spoke firmly. 'Why should you breakfast alone when you can have company at Bladon's Rock? And after the shock of the cramp you need a shot of brandy, or something of the sort. I'll see that you get it.' 'But I don't want Richard to know about the cramp. He's got one invalid already.' 'Then you shall get breakfast for the two of us at your cottage, and if you don't feel like it I'll cook it. You may not believe it, but I'm quite a good cook.'

He stood smiling at her, inviting a show of surprise; but all she felt was a bewildering and utterly extraordinary sensation of pleasure because he wasn't taking her back to the cottage and leaving her there, and he wasn't inflicting on her a mixed breakfast party at Richard's ... who was the sun and the moon and the stars to her only a few days ago. In fact, all her adult life Richard had been the only really important person in it, and she had been prepared to look to the future as bleak and uninviting because Richard was somebody she must dream about, and would never get to know in any sense of the word intimately. But now—all in a matter of moments, or so she was foolish enough to believe—her world had been changed. Contact with a man's mouth had done that for her, and she knew that never, never again would she feel like a beggar at Richard's table, hoping for a crumb of notice from him. It couldn't now matter to her whether he was in love with Roxanne, whether he was in love with Dana Jorgensen, or whether he had arrived at a phase when he was in love with no one. Richard and his love-life had stepped aside, been forced aside by a slender man with dark, derisive eyes, a lock of black hair that was inclined to dip down over his forehead when it wasn't severely disciplined, and a kind of pantherish grace. A man who had kissed her before the sun was really well up and warming the world, and whose fingers even when they only lightly touched her warmed her through and through. And she had made the discovery on a June day, in the twenty-sixth year of her life, while she was still free and unhampered and all life was before her! She stood hugging her white robe round her, and to the man who was watching her carefully she seemed suddenly to come to life.

Her eyes glowed, a rush of pink poured up under the clear skin of her cheeks, she smiled as if his admission that he was a good cook delighted and enchanted her, and then she said eagerly: 'All right! You shall cook the eggs and bacon while I make the coffee, and if you burn up all the food I've got inside the cottage we can still open a tin. Mrs. Duffy has a whole stack of tins stored away somewhere.' Valentine never forgot that breakfast, or the half hour in the kitchen that preceded it. In the end it was she who wielded the frying-pan and made the toast, and he did make a pot of very excellent coffee. He told her that in his student days, and particularly before examinations, he had kept himself going on pots of strong, black coffee, and his French grandmother had imparted to him the secret of making good coffee. While they sat at breakfast, and the sun poured over them and the check tablecloth, he told her other things about his French grandmother, and Valentine gathered that she had been an extremely wise and somewhat autocratic old lady. She lived in a tiny French chateau in Normandy, and Gaston had spent his school holidays with her, and now that she was dead—and his father too—owned the chateau. 'Do you ever stay there?' Valentine asked, wondering whether at heart he was more like his French relations or his English. In looks he was very French, and sometimes he developed a slight accent which she found fascinating. When he said her name— Valentine—for instance, he said it in a way that no Englishman would have said it. She began to wait for the moments when he called her by name. 'Sometimes,' he answered, smiling. He lighted a cigarette, and studied her through the faint blue haze of smoke. 'It is the sort of

house where one should settle down, or at least make one's headquarters. Where a married man could raise a family.' 'But you are not married?' she said, not because she wasn't certain—she was certain—but because she had to say something relevant. 'No.' His smile was a little more one-sided. 'No woman has ever found me bearable enough to wish to marry me.' 'And you -' her heart beat so fast as she put the question that she was afraid he would see the slight agitation at the base of her throat—'have you never found a woman you wanted to marry?' He hesitated a moment. He ground out his cigarette in an ashtray at his elbow, and he did it very deliberately with his slim, brown fingers. Then he said slowly: 'Not really. Not until it might have been too late.' 'You mean it was too late?' 'No.' He stood up, and she felt they were back on the old footing as he looked down at her quizzically. 'Shall we go now? I mustn't forget I have a patient, one I share with your excellent Dr. Eustace. It's high time I found out how she's doing this morning.' She accompanied him out to his car, and before he got into it he said: 'By the way, I mustn't forget. Richard insists that you come to dinner tonight. Can I pick you up about seven?' 'If it won't be a nuisance.'

He looked down at her, and his mouth twitched. 'Do you think it will be a nuisance?' he asked. She stood with her hand on the door of the car, and her whole being expanded with a mixture of excitement and the sharpest pleasure she had known in her life as she answered: 'I ... hope not!' His hand covered hers, and the magic and the warmth tore through her again. 'Don't be naive, little one,' he said softly, and the sleek grey car moved away from the gate.

CHAPTER EIGHT ROXANNE look rather peevish when Valentine saw her that night. Although she had not been to Bladon's Rock that day she had telephoned to find out how her friend was, and the reply had been so favourable that she had not deemed it necessary to do the steep climb to the house as she would be seeing her in the evening. But, as a result of fancied neglect, Roxanne looked peevish. Or was it something else, and not fancied neglect? Roxanne had everything she could possibly require in her room. She had books and magazines, a large basket of fruit, masses of flowers ... Richard must have ordered his gardener to send in an extra large quantity, for the room was more like a conservatory than a bedroom. Valentine wondered whether his conscience was worrying him about Roxanne, and whether he believed that the news of his engagement, broken to her so suddenly, had had something to do with her pitiable collapse. Richard himself, apparently, had been sitting with her again, and Valentine hoped it hadn't resulted in strained relations with his fiancée. Roxanne, it was obvious, still looked upon him in much the same way as she had always done, and that didn't mean she was any nearer to falling in love with him, even though she had been perfectly prepared to marry him if he hadn't arrived with a fiancée. 'What happened to you all day?' she asked, when Valentine, wearing a cloudy dark dinner dress and smelling delicately of a rather special perfume she was inclined to treasure, appeared in her room. 'I expected to see you this afternoon as you didn't turn up this morning.'

'I was busy this afternoon,' Valentine answered. 'And this morning?' 'I was busy this morning, too.' Valentine turned quickly to admire the roses that were placed close beside the bed. 'As a matter of fact, I don't like intruding more than I can help. You're here because you have to be here, but it's a bit of an infliction for Richard if I turn his house into a kind of private hotel as well.' 'That's nonsense, and you know it,' Roxanne returned, a little shortly. 'In the old days this house was Liberty Hall. And there's been a domestic crisis here today. The new man's wife scalded herself with a kettle, or something of the sort, and she's out of action at the moment. Duffy's running round in circles and won't be able to look after you at the cottage until a replacement has been found—a temporary one, of course. Richard thinks you ought to come and stay here and shut up the cottage.' But Valentine's immediate concern was for the new man's wife. 'Is it a bad scald? Is it likely to put her out of action for long? Did she have to go to hospital?' 'Oh, no, Dr. Lamoine treated it.' Roxanne's face puckered with a kind of dry humour. 'That man's earning his keep, isn't he? First me, and then Edith, or whatever she's called.' She lay looking at Valentine, and suddenly she said: 'I hear you went bathing with him this morning.' To Valentine's acute annoyance she flushed guiltily—and why she should do that she couldn't think.

'Yes, it was a before-breakfast bathe.' 'And he had breakfast with you in the cottage.' 'How do you know that?' Valentine stared at her, unable to believe that Dr. Lamoine had passed this information on to her himself. Although, of course, there was no reason why he shouldn't have passed it on, to Roxanne or anyone else. It wasn't a crime to have breakfast alone with a young woman in her cottage, although after such a brief acquaintance some people might think it odd. 'Richard told me.' The smile on Roxanne's lips was inexplicable, like the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa. 'Apparently he was rather surprised, because Dr. Lamoine isn't exactly a lady's man ... that is to say he's rather wary of women. A man in his profession usually is.' Valentine stared at her lap, wondering why she felt as if something she had been hugging to herself for the past few hours had been partially wrested from her. 'Don't think me interfering, darling,' Roxanne said in the husky, attractive voice she used when she wished to emphasize a point without being unpleasant about it, 'but you're not very sophisticated, and Lamoine is. You might read into something an importance that wasn't intended ... if you follow me.' 'I don't,' Valentine replied stiffly. 'Well, darling, he's attractive—very attractive— and he probably has to fend women off by the shoal. They'd involve him if they could, and I'm perfectly certain he's the last type of man who would ever seriously become involved, if he could avoid it. He's not the marrying kind.'

'How do you know?' Valentine asked, although the thing that annoyed her was the implication that she had already started to think of Dr. Lamoine in terms of marriage. Roxanne shrugged. 'I just know, that's all. It's fairly simple when you're experienced. There are the marriers and the non-marriers. Gaston Lamoine is a non-marrier.' 'You sound very sure.' 'I am . .. perfectly sure.' Roxanne even appeared surprised. 'He has a dislike of ties, and he's hard, basically hard. Any softness in him is concerned with patients, and to them he can be quite wonderful. He'll even treat them free of charge if they interest him enough, pour out his own money over them. He's generous, clever, patient, persistent, impervious, monastic ... and out of reach!' 'And did Richard tell you all this?' Roxanne's surprise grew and she was quite off her guard. 'Of course not! To find out all that one would have to know a person quite well—especially a man. Men don't betray themselves like woman. You have to get to know them.' 'And you do know Dr. Lamoine quite well? You met him before, didn't you?' The door opened quietly, and Dr. Lamoine entered the room. He was beautifully shaved and groomed and ready for the evening, in a well-cut dinner jacket, and his expression was thoughtful as he looked towards the bed. Roxanne, who had developed a faint flush in her cheeks, lay back with a sigh as he put his fingers on her

wrist and studied her with the detachment of the professional man. Then, her lips twisting almost painfully as she looked up at him, she said: 'It seems to me that this is becoming unnecessary, Doctor. I'm much better than I was, much better even than when I came here. Why don't you let me get up tomorrow?' 'Perhaps the day after tomorrow,' he answered. She made a face. 'I didn't bargain for this confinement to bed when I came up here to help get Richard's house ready for him! However,' her somewhat over-bright eyes holding his and growing ever brighter as the flush mounted in her cheeks, 'I didn't bargain for meeting you, either, did I, Doctor? And having you and Dr. Eustace holding solemn conclaves over me and coming to the fairly unanimous conclusion that I'm more or less done for! A woman of thirty- two who's nothing much more than a wreck!' 'Don't be absurd,' he said shortly. 'I'm not being absurd.' Her mouth twisted again. 'I'm just facing up to things.' She glanced with a slightly tormented gleam in her eyes at Valentine, slender and charming in her shadowy black dress. 'Go and have fun, you two,' she said harshly. 'Go and have a wonderful dinner, and afterwards walk in the moonlight on the edge of the cliffs. Valentine knows where there's a coy little garden seat, placed just where no one can stumble on you unawares, and where you can be alone with the sea and the night and all the mystery and the wonder of it. Only try and remember

that Valentine is completely inexperienced, Doctor. It isn't fair to take advantage of inexperience!' He walked to the bedside table and picked up a box of tablets and counted the ones that remained. 'How are you sleeping?' he asked. 'Very well when I take your pills.' 'You are taking my pills?' 'But of course.' She put back her red head against her pillow and smiled up at him derisively. 'What other pills would I be likely to take? Do you think Dr. Eustace is cleverer at prescribing than you are?' Lamoine didn't answer. Instead he said quietly: 'I'll look in and see you before you settle down for the night.' 'Do,' she returned lightly. 'If you can tear yourself away from that delectable garden seat!' Outside the door he stood aside for Valentine to precede him along the corridor, and although she sat next to him at dinner she found him very quiet. Richard, on the other hand, was in very good form, and as if she copied his moods Miss Jorgensen sparkled too, and looked distractingly lovely in the kind of dress Roxanne had always loved ... a shimmering silver that fitted her as if it loved every curve of her shapely body. Only when Roxanne was at her best she really was at her best, and it wasn't her looks alone that captivated. She was a brilliant conversationalist and would have made a magnificent hostess and mistress of a house like this.

Miss Jorgensen was as yet too young to be a brilliant conversationalist, and her upbringing had been entirely different from Roxanne's. She had not had Roxanne's many advantages, and Valentine felt rather sorry for her mother, facing her host at the opposite end of the table and looking as if she was not yet entirely satisfied in her own mind that her daughter had done either a wise thing, or a thing that was likely to be permanent. Valentine deputized for her when it came to pouring out coffee in the drawing-room afterwards, because she seemed to be nervous of handling the fragile porcelain cups—part of a very valuable coffee service. Gaston Lamoine, noting how gracefully Valentine presided at the low coffee table, smiled at her with the approval of a man who was innately fastidious, and liked to see square pegs fitting into square holes, and not otherwise if it could be avoided. 'Why didn't you and Richard become engaged?' he asked, very quietly, as he bent over her and accepted his own cup. She looked up almost startled, and their eyes met and held. 'You are the obvious wife for Richard.' The colour rolled hotly and painfully up over her face and neck, but at least she was not entirely shattered by the question. She no longer thought of herself as a wife whom Richard might have had if he had had the least desire to possess her for his own. 'What an extraordinary thing to say,' she returned hurriedly, glancing at the corner of the room where Richard and his fiancée were turning over a pile of records for the record-player. 'I'm sure it never occurred to either of us that you could be right.' 'Never?' he asked, and one of his eyebrows rose quizzically. She looked away from him hurriedly.

'Roxanne was the one we thought would marry Richard,' she said, as she refilled her own coffee cup. He straightened, and suddenly he sighed. 'How Miss Bladon must have enjoyed queening it over you all here in her glorious heyday,' he observed. 'Perhaps if you hadn't all gone out of your way to make her feel so completely indispensable she wouldn't have become so restless and set out to ruin her life.' 'You mustn't say that,' she said sharply, reprovingly. 'Roxanne has many happy years ahead of her yet. She must have!' For answer he had just looked at her and then walked away out of the room. She didn't see him again that night, for although she knew he was strolling in the grounds—perhaps looking for that sequestered garden seat Roxanne had mentioned to him—he didn't return to ask her to take a turn outside with him, and it was Richard who drove her home to the cottage just before ten o'clock. It was a glorious night, with a full moon shining above the sea, and Richard stopped his car on the cliff top to enable them to take an uninterrupted and really satisfying look at the restless expanse of shimmering water, with a line of creamy surf making soft crooning noises on the beach below them. 'Dana isn't very fond of the sea,' he remarked suddenly. 'In fact, she's one of those people with a dislike of cliff edges, and things like that. Perhaps one day I'll sell Bladon's Rock and buy a house inland.' He looked down at Valentine with a little smile curving his lips. 'What do you think of that?' 'Oh, you mustn't,' Valentine answered immediately. 'At least, not unless you feel Miss Jorgensen would be happier living somewhere else,' she amended.

He lighted a cigarette and studied her, with the moonlight making a kind of molten splendour of her hair. Her faint fragrance—he thought it was gardenia—rose to his nostrils, and he put out a hand and covered one of hers. 'Gaston told me you got into difficulties this morning,' he said. 'You mustn't swim out as far as you do if it's beyond your strength. Gaston also said he simply couldn't understand why I'd never married you!' Valentine looked up at him, startled. This was the second time the apparently astonishing fact that she hadn't married Richard was discussed . .. and this time by Richard himself! 'That's easily explained,' she replied, gently freeing her hand and clasping it with her other one in her lap. 'You were always in love with Roxanne. There was never a time when you weren't in love with her!' , 'I'm not now,' he said quietly. Once again she turned and looked at him. He looked a little tired, she thought—unless it was the effect of the moonlight—and a trifle depressed. 'No?' 'I've got over it completely. I feel as if I've got over some sort of an illness that I've had for years, and I can't help wondering why I've wasted so many years. Roxanne isn't my type ... not really. She and I would never have been happy if we'd married. But from the moment I clapped eyes on her—well, I fell for her. You all knew it, of course. You must often have pitied me.' 'We did,' she admitted truthfully.

His handsome grey eyes looked dark and reflective. 'I pitied myself sometimes. And then I went off abroad and tried to get her out of my system. She used me badly, you know. She took all the expensive presents I liked to load on her, and she gave me nothing ... nothing!' 'Well, now you've got Miss Jorgensen,' she said, feeling a trifle uncomfortable because the last thing she had expected was this open discussion of his secret love life after so long on their way home to her cottage. 'You can be happy now, and forget Roxanne.' 'I can never forget Roxanne because she's forged a kind of hold on me, and I disliked to see her as she is now ... I wish there was something I could do to give her back her health and her beauty. But there's nothing. And as for Dana ... Valentine!' He took her hand again, determinedly. 'Do you know when it was that I decided to get married as soon as I could find someone who'd have me?' 'No?' regarding him wonderingly. 'After that night when you went back with us to my flat, and I introduced you to Gaston because he was one of the guests. He said, the next time I met him, that you were charming ... and I'd never heard Gaston describe any woman as charming before. I began to think about you and the way you always remained in the background, although you're so pretty ... lovely, I'd say,' noting the way her soft hair grew back from her brow, her feathery brown eyebrows and the eyelashes that were dusted with gold at the tips. 'And I knew what Gaston meant. You're all woman, and you're charming. You don't pretend, you're just yourself. The man who eventually married you would be lucky!' 'So you got yourself engaged to Miss Jorgensen,' she said dryly.

'Yes ... that's the extraordinary part about it. Thinking of you, I got engaged to someone else. And now I'm irrevocably tied up. I've sold my freedom for a mess of pottage. I can't come to you and ask you to marry me because I'm not free.' Suddenly she wanted to laugh ... which proved she had travelled a long way in an entirely opposite direction from loving him. His confession struck her as absurd, and yet she knew he was perfectly serious. He had blundered badly, and because she was all woman, as he himself had put it, he felt he must pour his troubles out to her, and that perhaps she would be able to suggest some wonderful solution to his problem. But she couldn't. She even felt a little vexed with him because he was behaving badly. Slightly empty-headed Dana Jorgensen had got him, and she must be allowed to keep him. For one thing, Valentine didn't want him. It was an extraordinary admission to have to make to herself after all the years of wanting him, but it was no more and no less than the truth. She didn't want him! Nothing he could ever say or do or offer her could ever make her want him now that she knew exactly what she did want. 'I'm sorry, Richard,' she said. 'But you are engaged, and it isn't very fair to Miss Jorgensen to be talking like this. When you're married ... well, I'm sure you'll be happy, if you make up your mind to be. All the years when you wandered about the world must have filled you with a desire to settle down, and you can settle down now, even if you decide to do so somewhere other than at Bladon's Rock. But it seems a pity that you should give up Bladon's Rock.' He stared into the path of moonlight.

'I've never really been happy on this coast,' he admitted. 'Roxanne was like a will-o'-the-wisp, whenever I was here, dancing ahead of me all the time, and I pursued her blindly. I never stopped to think that I might be pursuing the wrong will-o'-the-wisp! ' Wryly he turned to her. 'But it seems I've missed the boat in any case. You're not interested, even if you ever were—and somehow I got hold of the notion that you were at one time. It's like being a seaman and missing the tide.' 'Let's go on,' she said gently, after a long moment of silence. 'It's getting late.' When he set her down at her gate she knew that something more was coming. 'Pack a bag and come back with me, Valentine,' he begged. 'We're old friends, and I feel somehow that I need you now at Bladon's Rock. Between Roxanne and Dana and her mother I'm beginning to feel like the dormouse and the teapot ... either they'll shove me in or I'll take off suddenly, and that will be the last they'll see of me. Which would hardly be gentlemanly behaviour! So save me from letting down the Sternes, and come back with me now.' She hesitated, drawn for a reason he did not yet suspect to the idea of returning to Bladon's Rock. 'I don't like leaving the cottage,' she protested. 'It won't run away.' He smiled down at her tautly, coaxingly. 'You can turn the key in the lock, and Duffy'll pop in sometimes and make sure everything's all right. Or you can do so yourself.' 'How long do you want me to stay?' she asked, looking up at him with her extraordinarily clear golden-brown eyes in the moonlight.

'Until Roxanne's better. For the rest of the summer. As long as you like!' 'In that case I'll have to bring my modelling things with me,' she said. 'I've one or two commissions I must go ahead with. It would mean that you'd have to let me have a room where I can work.' 'The tower room,' he suggested swiftly. 'Roxanne's old room. I'll have it fitted up for you and no one will ever be allowed to disturb you.' His voice was suddenly eager. 'This is wonderful, Valentine, to have you living and working in the house ... my calm and competent Valentine! My Valentine with the spun-gold hair!' gazing at her soberly. She turned away and put her key in the lock. 'I'll get Jim Anderson to drive me up to the house tomorrow,' she said. 'I'll need the morning to pack and put the cottage in order.' 'I'll come for you myself.' He glanced at the dark front of the cottage and frowned suddenly. 'I don't like the idea of you spending the night alone here. Let me come in and wait while you pack your things, and I'll take you back tonight.' But she wouldn't hear of that. 'Don't be silly,' she said, even faintly amused when she thought of the nights she had spent alone in either the cottage or her London flat while he lightheartedly—certainly so far as she was concerned—travelled the globe. 'Very well.' But he was most reluctant to leave her. Even after he had turned away he turned back, and suddenly she found that he was holding her fast and kissing her clumsily, although the kiss was only clumsy because she averted her head in time.

'Sorry,' he said, grinning in a way that was by no means repentant, and even struck her as slightly schoolboyish. 'But you look so tempting in that black dress. And I should have done it long ago, anyway!' defiantly. When his car had driven away Valentine stood in the silent hall of the cottage and bent her head against the newel post of the stairs. Twice in one day she had been kissed ... and they were very different kisses. One, long awaited, had aroused nothing in the nature of emotion inside her, whereas the other, unexpected, and after an exceptionally brief acquaintanceship, had brought her to life with a jerk. It had turned her into a new woman.

CHAPTER NINE SHE spent the next morning putting the cottage into order, locking doors and windows and packing cases for herself, and although she had said she would take a taxi to Bladon's Rock she was not surprised when, long before she was ready to leave, Richard arrived to take her back to his house. He carried her cases out to the car and stowed them away in the boot, stowed her modelling things away, too, and turned the key in the front door himself and then slipped it into his pocket, telling her smilingly that she could ask him for it when she needed it. She was a little surprised that Dana hadn't accompanied him, and yet in a way she was not surprised. She had the feeling that Miss Jorgensen was not in the mood to give her an enthusiastic welcome when she saw Richard obviously full of satisfaction as he hurried her up the steps and into the house. He told one of the new maids to take her things up to the tower suite and unpack for her, and then he led the way into the library and poured out drinks for all three of them. Gaston, who must have known she was expected, did not put in an appearance and join them. 'Here's to you, Valentine!' Richard said, as he lifted his glass. 'And here's to all the good work you'll do while you're here.' 'Why, how long is Miss Shaw staying?' Dana asked, her slender brows wrinkling. 'And is she going to work here?' 'We hope so,' Richard answered complacently. He ruffled his fiancée's hair ... which must have annoyed her, as it was particularly impeccable and a wonderful red-gold in the sunshine that flooded the booklined room. 'If you're nice to her she might

even consent to do a model of your head. Children and lovely creatures like you ... those are the subjects she chooses.' But not even the fact that he paid her the tribute of openly stating he considered her a lovely creature had the effect of reconciling Dana noticeably to Miss Shaw's arrival. She finished her drink and left the room, and Richard didn't even bother to ask where she was going. Instead he told Valentine to let him know whether anything at all that she wanted was missing from the tower suite. 'My mother is coming to stay for a few days with us at the end of next week,' he said. 'She'll love to find you here.' But Valentine half wondered whether Mrs. Sterne might not think it odd that her son was not impatient to be alone with his future wife, and that his house had been turned partially into a nursing home and partially into a work place for Valentine herself. It was not until she went upstairs to see Roxanne that she learned the reason why she had not so far seen Dr. Lamoine. 'He left by the early train for London this morning,' she said. 'He'll be away a few days, or so he gave me to understand.' Her green eyes grew a trifle hard and derisive. 'Don't tell me he didn't prepare you for his absence last night? I thought the two of you were getting to know one another so well that he'd be bound to tell you.' 'Don't be absurd,' Valentine returned shortly, and walked over to the window. 'I'm not being absurd.' Roxanne lay looking at her with the bright glitter in her eyes. 'It's obvious you two hit it off, as they say. He thinks you're sane and well-balanced, and like a refreshing breeze. He told me that himself!'

Valentine felt almost startled. Sane and well- balanced ... and charming! And yet he had gone away without even letting her know he was going. 'Richard, too,' Roxanne continued. 'He was almost childishly pleased this morning because he'd prevailed upon you to shut up the cottage. You'll have Miss Jorgensen flying at your throat if you start weaning her fiancé from her.' Valentine was about to make some indignant reply, but Roxanne held up a hand and shook her slightly by declaring: 'Some people are late starters, particularly women. They draw little or no attention to themselves when they're young and dumb and perhaps a bit gauche. You didn't exactly mesmerize the males when you were in your late teens, but now that you're twenty-six it would appear that they're going to find it hard to resist you. We shall have to apply the tag of "breaker of hearts" to you if you break up Richard's romance for him.' Valentine was so angry that she left the room, leaving Roxanne indolently reaching out for a new novel; and she went upstairs to the tower suite and marvelled that it was to be hers after so many years. In the old days Roxanne had given parties in the room where she was to work, and it was she who had had the window seats padded. From the windows of the tower a truly spectacular view of the sea was to be obtained—in fact, it was a little like being up in an aircraft. On a fine day the rooms were flooded with sunlight, and as one of them at least faced south the brightness lingered all day, and the sunsets were something to watch for. Valentine found that Richard had wasted no time in issuing instructions, and the tower suite had been made much more than

merely comfortable for her. A rug had been taken from one room, and a pair of curtains from another. There was a low divan in the sitting-room on which she could recline when she felt tired, and several deep and comfortable chairs. There were some enchanting water- colours on the walls and one or two graceful statuettes and ornaments, a useful but beautiful desk and a bowl of flowers on an occasional table that would also hold a coffee tray. When she first looked round the room Valentine felt pleasure, and then just a touch of anxiety. For one thing, the flowers in the bowl were roses, old- fashioned darkish red roses with a singularly sweet scent, and the same roses were on the dressing-table in the bedroom. She wondered whether Miss Jorgensen had had a look round the rooms before she took possession of them. Gaston remained away for nearly a week, and during that time the weather changed. At first it could not have been more perfect, and each morning Richard and the two girls went down to the beach for early morning bathes, and Richard was careful to keep Valentine under close observation and warned her that if she attempted to over-reach herself there would be repercussions. She didn't know what the repercussions would be, but she did appreciate the fact that her host was in earnest, and that the whole time they were on the beach he kept up a liaison with her that was quite unremitting. In the afternoons they went for drives, and in the evenings Valentine divided her time between working in her own room and sitting with Roxanne. Sometimes she played chess with Mrs. Jorgensen, but otherwise Dana's mother was left very much to her own devices, and Valentine wondered how soon she would find

life at Bladon's Rock a little dull and monotonous, and long for a return to the flat and the life and the friends she had in London. When the weather suddenly changed and became wild and squally she wondered still more. Mrs. Jorgensen was definitely the odd man out, and found it difficult to pass the time, although her daughter looked more contented when she could shut herself away in the library with Richard and a blazing log fire, and it was an obvious intrusion if anyone else sought to gain admittance. Somewhat to Valentine's surprise Roxanne betrayed few symptoms of restlessness, and remained in bed as she had been instructed without arguing very much about it. Dr. Eustace looked in daily to see her, and she liked him enough to find it pleasant talking to him. When he left the room Valentine thought he always looked thoughtful and preoccupied, although when she asked him how her friend was doing he replied with a vague smile and some stock-in-trade phrases: 'Oh, she's doing very nicely. The rest is doing her good, you know. She needs a lot of rest, and sleep. Keep her cheerful, and don't let her get up until Dr. Lamoine returns and has had an opportunity to see her.' 'What exactly is the matter with her, Doctor?' Valentine asked once. The doctor, who had been examining a portrait on the wall of the corridor, turned and adjusted his glasses and caught sight of another portrait that interested him at the opposite end of the corridor. 'Oh, she's weak ... malnutrition, and so forth, I'd say. Neglected herself shockingly, and smokes too many cigarettes. You mustn't let her have so many. At one time she must have had a touch of

T.B., but her lungs are clear enough now. Pulse is a bit eccentric and heart's a bit tired…' 'Tired? When she's only thirty-two!' He shrugged. 'It all depends upon the life you lead whether your heart becomes tired or not, young lady.' He peered upwards at the portrait that interested him. 'That, surely, is a Bladon?' he said. 'Great-uncle of Miss Roxanne? I seem to remember one of them was an admiral. They went in mostly for the sea. Must have been taken over with the house.' 'It was,' Valentine said. She accompanied him as far as the front door, and then returned to Roxanne's room. Roxanne, lying luxuriously on her pillows and smoking the inevitable cigarette, looked at her with bright, questioning, mocking eyes. 'Well, what did the old man say?' she asked. 'He's getting a bit doddery, isn't he? Been on the job too long. He ought to retire.' 'He was more interested in your great-uncle in the corridor than in you, I think,' Valentine answered, not altogether truthfully. Roxanne's eyebrows went up. 'Old Uncle Josiah? Well, he's got poor taste! He drank himself to death, I think.' She raised herself on her pillows. 'What did he really say about me?' she insisted. 'Nothing, except that you've got to stay where you are until Dr. Lamoine returns.' She removed the box of cigarettes from the

bedside table. 'I ought to lock these up, because you're smoking far too many. That's one thing Dr. Eustace said.' 'When is Gaston returning?' Roxanne's voice was suddenly thin and high. 'I can stay here until he returns, unless he's coming back soon. And he ought to return soon. He owes it to me, to look after me now!' 'Why should Dr. Lamoine look after you now?' Valentine asked, standing at the foot of the bed. 'I mean, why, particularly? And what is it that he owes you?' Roxanne made a little impatient gesture. It was obvious she thought she had said too much. 'You mustn't take me so literally. After all, I didn't ask him to start doctoring me after I passed out the other day, did I? He could have behaved like a normal guest here and got on to Dr. Eustace as soon as he'd brought me round. But, as it was, he didn't get on to Dr. Eustace until the following day, after he himself had given me a thorough examination. He treated me, started dishing out orders, and therefore he's responsible for me.' 'Any doctor in similar circumstances would have done the same thing,' Valentine reminded her. 'But that wouldn't have made him responsible for you once a local man was called in.' 'But this local man is taking his orders from Dr. Lamoine,' Roxanne reminded her triumphantly. Valentine half turned away, and then she turned back. 'You called him Gaston just now,' she said. 'You've been accustomed to calling him Gaston, haven't you?'

Roxanne looked momentarily cornered, and then a gleam appeared in her eyes ... the usual, over- bright, derisive gleam. 'I call all my men by their Christian names as soon as I get to know them,' she said carelessly. 'It simplifies matters. And Lamoine happens to be Gaston. Therefore I think of him as Gaston. I'm sure you already think of him that way.' That night the wind fairly shrieked round the house, and the sea was as rough as Valentine had ever seen it. She spent a large part of the night watching it from the window seat of her bedroom in the tower, and in the morning she learned that Roxanne, too, had been kept awake by the storm. She was looking colourless and haggard, with dark half-circles under her eyes, and she complained that her sleeping tablets weren't powerful enough. 'If I'd had my own I'd have slept,' she said. 'But they were taken away from me.' 'Did Dr. Lamoine take them away?' 'Yes, who else?' And she grimaced in a way that made her look even more haggard and painfully plain. She also sounded a trifle vicious. 'It was mean of him. But then I've reason to know that he can be—horribly mean.' Valentine went for a long walk through the remains of the storm after breakfast. She was not surprised to see that there were trees down in the park-like enclosure that adjoined the grounds of Bladon's Rock, and the beach was littered with the kind of seawrack that is thrown up after a storm. She picked her way through it and returned to the house to find a familiar long grey car standing at the foot of the steps before the porch. Still glistening

with rain and seawater, her heart thumping violently with excitement, she made her way up to Roxanne's room and eagerly pushed open the door. A uniformed figure rose from a chair beside the bed and confronted her. She was dark, with penetrating dark eyes and an oval face, a beautiful but rather thin mouth, and satin smooth hair partially concealed by her nurse's cap. She was both elegant and competentlooking in her crisp uniform and immaculate white apron, and her expression said plainly that she had no idea at all what Valentine could be doing there. Roxanne's voice, from the bed, spoke dryly. 'I'm in, charge of a nurse, now, darling. Dr. Lamoine brought her back with him. In future, if you wish to see me, you'll have to ask her permission.'

CHAPTER TEN VALENTINE was both surprised and taken aback. It had never occurred to her that Roxanne was ill enough to need a nurse, and this one struck her as so remarkably efficient that even that was a kind of shock. If she was as efficient as she looked she would have to be paid, and Roxanne certainly couldn't pay her. Richard might be willing to do so. Perhaps Richard had been talked into getting a nurse for Roxanne. 'It's all right, darling,' Roxanne said carelessly, smiling inexplicably. 'It's Dr. Lamoine's idea, and presumably his experiment. See how well I get on with someone to watch over me constantly and not let me do any of the things I ought not to do! Sister Thibault is French, and she's very attractive, isn't she? Sister Marie Thibault! Even the name is attractive!' 'Can I help you?' Sister Thibault enquired of Valentine, politely. Her eyes roved over Valentine's glistening raincoat. 'If you wish to have a chat with my patient it might be wiser if you got rid of those wet things first. I don't think I can allow you to approach any nearer the bed until you have done so.' Valentine backed hastily to the door, and Roxanne called in the same mocking voice: 'Dr. Lamoine isn't here, poppet! I give you my word he isn't hiding under the bed or concealed in the bathroom. He's probably closeted with Richard.' As soon as she was outside in the corridor, Valentine heard the door click quietly to, and she turned and hurriedly retraced her footsteps and climbed the short flight of stairs to her tower suite. No sooner had she pushed open the door of the sitting-room than

she realized that Dr. Lamoine was there, standing in the middle of the floor and coolly taking in all the details of her hastily arranged tower rooms. He smiled at her in a way he had never smiled at her before, with unsmiling eyes and a steely look round his mouth. 'You seem to be very comfortable here,' he remarked. 'Richard told me he was going to do his best to induce you to join your friend beneath his hospitable roof, and it seems to me that you have scored slightly over Miss Bladon. She has a bedroom and a bathroom, and you have a bedroom, bathroom, and sitting-room. Some of the things that are in here were in Richard's own rooms until a few days ago -' He picked up a beautiful little bronze that stood on the writing-desk, and indicated one of the Persian rugs. 'That particular rug is a favourite of Richard's. It comes from his bedroom. And the French clock on the mantelpiece always had pride of place in his dressing-room. And you seem to be embowered in roses.' 'Well?' she said, looking directly at him. He smiled even less pleasantly. 'It's very well, if you're satisfied. But you seem to have travelled a long way since the days when he regarded you as a long-legged, freckled child without any real potentialities.' 'I think you must be forgetting,' she said primly, 'that Richard is engaged.' 'No, my dear, it's you who are possibly—just possibly! —in danger of forgetting.'

A kind of spreading dismay took possession of her, but at the same time she felt indignant. So indignant that her voice actually shook as she attempted to refute his unpleasant insinuations. 'Richard and I have known one another for years, as you are perfectly well aware,' she said. 'He wanted me to be here because Roxanne is here, and he had these rooms fitted up so that I could occupy them and also work here. He knows I have to work.' 'And were you discussing your work when he took you home the other night, and you lingered for such a long while on the cliff top, admiring the moon? I happened to be walking on the cliffs, and I saw you. It seemed to me that for old friends you were enjoying your sense of isolation, and in no hurry to part. When I got back to the house Richard still hadn't returned, and his fiancée was getting anxious about him.' So that was it. Valentine felt as if someone had abruptly smacked her face, or accused her of dishonesty. She also felt her dismay increase by leaps and bounds as the full meaning of that contemptuous gleam in Gaston Lamoine's dark eyes became absolutely clear to her. 'If you think that…' she began. And then she suddenly stopped herself. She had allowed Richard to kiss her without making it clear to him that he had absolutely no right to do anything of the kind, and under no circumstances must he repeat the offence; but Gaston had also kissed her, and without the excuse of having known her for years. He had done it almost casually, and afterwards had behaved as if he had either forgotten that he had done so, or didn't wish her to imagine he would be tempted to do so again. He had even gone off to London without saying goodbye to her.

She stiffened. 'Why did you bring a nurse back with you for Roxanne?' she asked. 'Because it's important that she should be properly nursed from now on. I don't know whether you ever suspected it, but she's been taking drugs for years. I'm very much afraid that she still has something to which she resorts occasionally hidden somewhere among her things.' 'You mean ... the tablets she was in the habit of taking?' 'The tablets and other things. There are many methods of taking drugs, you know, not as clumsy as a hypodermic needle.' Valentine received her second shock that day. No wonder Roxanne had alternated between moodiness and excessive cheerfulness when she was at the cottage. No wonder she looked at times so haggard, and at others as if she might one day be her old self again. 'I see,' she said, and the uniformed figure in Roxanne's room became a sinister figure to her, someone who would watch Roxanne remorselessly, and anyone who visited Roxanne with suspicion. The old days—the old carefree days at Bladon's Rock— were indeed dead. 'Why don't you put her into a nursing-home?' she asked. 'Because for the moment I'm quite well satisfied with where she is,' he answered.

He turned and made for the door, and before she could ask him anything further he had closed the door and was descending the tower stairs. So much, Valentine thought, going slowly over to the window and looking out at the driving rain, for the eagerness with which she had awaited his return! The secret hopefulness! At lunch that day he and Richard carried on a conversation, while nobody else had much to say, and in the evening Sister Thibault made her appearance at dinner. She was still wearing her uniform, and her clinical coolness affected Dana with a sense of alarm and despondency; Mrs. Jorgensen looked as if she regarded her arrival as the last straw, and Valentine kept more or less silent throughout the meal. She was aware of the glances the French nurse directed at the doctor—attentive, subservient, admiring, and occasionally eager; but apart from that she was as aloof as a star when they seem particularly far away, and perhaps because her uniform was very fetching she succeeded in making the other women seem almost ordinary. Valentine followed her upstairs after dinner was over, and asked if she could see Roxanne. Lamoine entered the room while Sister Thibault was making the invalid comfortable for the night, and he stood in a corner watching while Valentine said her goodnight to Roxanne. 'Come and see me in the morning, early, won't you?' Roxanne urged. She glanced towards the dark figure in the corner, and then at the starched figure of the nurse. 'I feel as if I've entrusted myself to a pair of jailers. I'm inclined to wish I'd stayed at your cottage, Val,' with a wry twist of her lips. In the morning she looked rested, but wan and a trifle defeated.

'They tell me I can get up today,' she said. 'I'm to sit in a chair here in my room, but if it's fine tomorrow I can go out on to the terrace. A reward for a good girl!' and the lips she had recently made up brilliantly twisted, not wryly, but bitterly. The next day was still not fine, so she remained in her room. Richard visited her, and Valentine sat with her for a large part of the day, making it possible for the nurse to have a few hours off duty. Roxanne took advantage of her absence to confide to Valentine how much she disliked her, and Valentine was disturbed by her inference that she was a kind of girl-friend of Dr. Lamoine's. 'Why otherwise should he bring her down here?' she said. 'I'm not at death's door, or anything like that. I'm feeling better every day, and in fact I could go for a walk and not feel tired. But they'll see to it that I remain an invalid for as long as it suits their convenience ... Sister Thibault's and Gaston Lamoine's convenience ... that is.' Valentine put down a piece of sewing she had been engaged on and looked at her with wide eyes. 'Dr. Lamoine wouldn't dare to do a thing like that,' she said. 'Bring a nurse down here to take charge of you if you didn't need a nurse. He's a highly thought of London doctor, not a quack!' Roxanne shrugged. 'If she was ten years older and unattractive I'd probably believe you. But she can't be any older than you are, and when she came in to look at me in the night, although I pretended to be asleep, I could see she was wearing a shattering dressing- gown that you'd hardly find decorating the cubicle of some nurses' home. And that uniform is designed to show off her French chic, and she's attached

to a London nursing-home to which only really wealthy patients are admitted. Dr. Lamoine himself, I believe, runs it.' 'Then that explains why he picked Sister Thibault to look after you. It was the obvious thing to do and involved no trouble or loss of time.' 'Except that I wasn't all that desperately in need of a nurse, and time wasn't a vital issue.' Roxanne rested her head against the cushions behind her, and her green eyes grew languid and thoughtful. I wish I had your simplicity, Val, and was as easily deceived. But I've knocked about the world, and I know men. Gaston Lamoine isn't interested in women, or so he likes people to believe, but Sister Thibault calls him Gaston, and he calls her Marie. I heard them when they thought I couldn't possibly overhear.' Valentine's eyebrows ascended. 'But even that isn't really conclusive,' she pointed out. 'Isn't it?' Roxanne looked mildly contemptuous. 'Then you know nothing about the kind of etiquette that exists between a doctor and a nurse. He never calls her by her Christian name, and she certainly never calls him by his Christian name, unless it slips out by accident. As a result of being rather more familiar with the personal rather than the professional side of the man and the woman who are working together!' Valentine put away her needlework, and inside her something seemed finally to die. 'Anyway,' she said quietly, 'it doesn't really matter, does it? You're being well looked after, and that's the only important thing.'

But Roxanne came upright in her chair, and her voice developed a shrill note Valentine had never even suspected it could on occasion. 'You little idiot!' she exclaimed. 'Of course it matters! After all these years—five of them, actually—to come across Gaston again and get him into a situation where he has to recognize my existence, and then to have him making love to a cheap little thirdrate nurse under my eyes!' 'Roxanne!' Valentine exclaimed, horrified. 'You know very well that's completely untrue!' 'For the moment, yes.' But Roxanne's eyes were hard as green flints. 'It's simply a matter of time, however, before it ceases to be untrue. And if I can't be the woman in his life I'll see that no other woman gets him, ever! I give you my word on that.' Valentine felt stunned and appalled. So that was Roxanne's secret .. . the one Lamoine had been so afraid she might betray that he had more or less hypnotized her into keeping silent. She had had an affair with him, and it hadn't been a happy affair. She had been in love with him—still was! —and to him she was nothing more than a sick and faded woman who might compromise his future, and for whom he felt no tenderness whatsoever. When he looked at her there was something faintly distasteful in his eyes, and save for the purpose of taking her pulse or making a medical check he never approached nearer to her than he need. And now he had brought a nurse down to look after her, one with whom he might be on familiar terms ... or that could be simply and solely Roxanne's jealousy. She would see any woman on whom he smiled occasionally as a deadly rival.

She had even begun to suspect Valentine, her life-long friend, of wishing to be on better terms with him! Valentine felt her cheeks grow slowly hot as if an inner fire scorched them as she reflected on her own weakness where Dr. Lamoine was concerned. There came a quiet tap at the door, and he entered without waiting to receive permission. He was looking urbane, affable, and he crossed to Roxanne's chair and looked down at her with a slight, enquiring smile on his lips. 'Well?' he said. 'How are you feeling? Like going for that long walk you keep talking about tomorrow?' Roxanne almost dissolved under his eyes. When he put his fingers on her wrist in order to test her pulse Valentine could almost feel the tension going out of her, the bitter resentment. Beneath his hands she was all pliability, all weakness, all woman. It made Valentine feel a little sick. Especially when she heard the husky voice that had so enchained Richard at one time say pathetically: 'I mean to go for a good long walk before long, and you can come along with me, Doctor. To make certain I don't fall over the edge of the cliff or anything like that.' 'I'm afraid I can only remain down here for a few more days,' Gaston told her, smiling with a softness that was not often to be seen in his smiles. 'But when I return again we'll take that walk. You'll be stronger then, much stronger, I hope.' Valentine rose hurriedly and went to the window. He was making her a promise which he had no intention of keeping ... which he thought it unlikely it would be necessary for him to keep. Roxanne was in no condition to take long walks, she wouldn't be for some

time, but it buoyed her up to think that one day he might accompany her. And she had to call him 'Doctor', when once she had been in love with him. What had happened to that love, and why did he so seldom unbend to a woman who had loved him? And why did he call one of his own nurses by her Christian name, and place her where her mere presence could cause unhappiness to the patient for whom he no longer cared? Valentine turned deliberately and walked to the door. 'I'll see you later, Roxanne,' she said. She completely ignored the man who had not hesitated to accuse her of jeopardizing Miss Jorgensen's future, although he had little enough to go on apart from a moonlight drive and a few evidences of long-term friendship on Richard's part, and she had the satisfaction of feeling him frowning behind her back. As she walked away along the corridor she wondered whether Roxanne noticed the frown.

CHAPTER ELEVEN SHE was awakened next morning by a loud tap on her door, and Richard called from the corridor: 'It's a brilliant morning, and we're going down to bathe. Come on, and join us!' When she joined them Lamoine was one of the party, and he looked at her very levelly as she approached along the terrace. Dana, in a yellow swim- suit, raced ahead with Richard, and Mrs. Jorgensen —quite a good figure, and actually rather like her daughter in a carefully preserved way—followed close behind them. Valentine was forced to fall in with the doctor, and she seized the opportunity to say without looking at him: 'What about Sister Thibault? Doesn't she bathe? Or do her duties preclude such flippant activities as that?' He answered while he helped her to clamber over a rock. 'Sister Thibault has her off-duty times, and I've no doubt she'll fit in a bathe some time today. She's rather a keen swimmer, as a matter of fact.' 'Not liable to cramp, I hope,' she said conversationally. 'If so, you'd better be on hand, Doctor.' He glanced at her sideways with a curious alertness. 'So far as I know she isn't afflicted by cramp.' It was certainly a glorious morning after the rain and the wind of the day before, and sea and sky were already a deep, Mediterranean blue. Valentine swam lazily close to the shore, and

Mrs. Jorgensen was the one who provided a display of physical fitness by racing Richard to the island that had often been Valentine's goal in the past. Lamoine taught Dana a new method of keeping herself afloat without making any effort at all, and then accompanied her back to the beach when she was the first to grow tired of the water. At breakfast Lamoine continued his attentive- ness to Dana Jorgensen, although Sister Thibault joined them and was disinclined to talk to anyone unless it was the doctor who addressed her. Valentine, who sat next to her, asked her about Roxanne. 'She had a good night,' the nurse replied, drinking black coffee and smoking a cigarette with a withdrawn expression on her face. 'In fact, she had a very good night.' 'Do you see signs of improvement in her condition, or do you think you'll have to stay with her for long?' She shrugged her shoulders. 'That depends on Dr. Lamoine, and also, I suppose, to a certain extent on Dr. Eustace. When they are agreed that I am no longer necessary I shall go back.' 'To London? To Dr. Lamoine's nursing-home?' 'Yes.' The dark eyes met hers with faint amusement. 'What sort of cases do you have in the nursing- home? Are they mostly cases involving nervous disorders? That sort of thing?' 'Yes. And that isn't really surprising as Dr. Lamoine is a neurologist.'

'No, I suppose not.' And then Valentine felt a kind of rebellion rising up inside her, a dislike of having to admit that Roxanne, her close friend since childhood, should have arrived at a condition that made it permissible for other people to decide that she was no longer as well balanced as she had been at one time, and that there were even moments when she might do herself permanent harm if she was not watched. She suddenly felt that she had to exert herself on Roxanne's behalf, and made the impulsive suggestion that she take her back to her cottage and look after her herself, in an atmosphere where she might be less inclined to come to look upon herself as an invalid. And where her restoration to health would involve less expense. 'Dr. Eustace could continue to look in on her,' she said, 'and I could do the nursing, Miss Bladon and I are old friends, and we understand one another. I would like to do everything I can for her.' 'I'm sure you would,' Sister Thibault returned smoothly. 'But I don't think Dr. Lamoine would agree with you that your "everything" would be enough in this case.' 'But I had her before,' Valentine said swiftly. 'She was getting better until I brought her here.' Sister Thibault merely smiled at her in a faintly interested manner. Valentine looked along the table and caught Gaston Lamoine's eyes on her, watching her. She bit her lip. 'And anyway, there is the question of the expense,' she said. 'I know that Miss Bladon can't possibly afford to pay for a nurse, and in point of fact, she can't afford to pay Dr. Lamoine, either. But I'm willing to pay all her medical expenses if I can have her and look after her.'

'I wouldn't worry about that side of the matter if I were you, Miss Shaw,' Sister Thibault said softly. 'Mr. Sterne is more than willing to pay all Miss Bladon's expenses, and if that was not the case Dr. Lamoine would attend to them himself. I'm quite sure of that.' 'But why?' Valentine asked, biting her lip again. 'Why should Richard have to pay? Or Dr. Lamoine! I'm here, and it isn't as if Roxanne was a hospital case. She's improving, she can get up. And nursing-homes,' looking round carefully at Sister Thibault, 'are usually pretty busy.' 'They are,' the other agreed brightly, and crushed out her cigarette in an ashtray. She stood up and smiled in a manner that made her dark eyes seem infinitely attractive as Dr. Lamoine left the table and passed behind their chairs. 'Oh, Doctor,' she said, 'I'd like to have a word with you as soon as possible. Have you been upstairs yet and looked at your patient?' 'Not yet. I'm on my way now.' 'Oh, good, then I'll come with you.' The two of them passed out of the dining-room, and Valentine had received nothing but a barely recognizing look from Gaston Lamoine. His detachment was perfectly normal, she realized, but somehow it affected her with a curious sensation like desperation. That he should pass her by when she had wanted to talk to him herself—about Roxanne—and that he should do it with his dark head very erect and his dark look glancing off her as if it was a sliver of ice that couldn't possibly attach itself to her, made her wonder whether she had dreamed those few moments when he kissed her. And as she went out into the sunshine she saw Marie Thibault's equally dark eyes smiling at her with amusement.

If Marie Thibault knew what was in Valentine's heart she probably had reason to look amused, and to feel complacent about her position in the household. As often happens after a spell of bad weather the wildness returned after lunch, and as Valentine felt unable to work in her room she decided to go for a walk. In the old days she had loved walking in bad weather on the exposed cliff top, and she still loved the sting of the rain on her face and watching the sea boiling at the foot of the cliffs. She was slight enough to find it difficult to stand up to even a moderate gale, but that didn't prevent her venturing as near to the edge of the cliffs as she dared, and frequently venturing down on to the beach. Today the wind was so strong that she thought she would be beaten back if she tried to get down on to the beach, so she turned inland and walked along the hedge-lined road which led to the village, and a car came along the road and stopped alongside her, and the driver let down his window. 'Get in,' said Gaston Lamoine, when he saw how wet she was. She hesitated for a moment, but he repeated in the tone of one who would take no refusal: 'Get in.' Valentine subsided on to the seat beside him. Her mackintosh was gleaming with rain, and her hair, which was inadequately protected by a headscarf, was soaked. Lamoine's eyes roved over her deliberately before he started up the car, and then he said: 'Obviously you like getting wet, but it doesn't seem very sensible to me, unless you had some urgent reason for being out in the rain. And if that was so, all you had to do was to ask someone to drive you to wherever it is you want to go.'

'I don't want to go anywhere,' Valentine replied, 'in a car. I felt like a walk, and so I went for a walk, and I was going to make my way by a roundabout route down to the cove where we bathed this morning and then back along the beach.' 'By which time you would have been soaked to the skin, and gone down with pneumonia somewhere within the next few days,' Gaston remarked. 'Oh, no, Doctor!' She smiled at him, coping with a drop that was running down her nose from her hair with a somewhat inadequate handkerchief— until he silently handed her his much larger one. 'I wouldn't like the demand on your services to be too great, and I would have spared you that. I promise you that if I develop something more serious than a snuffle while we're both Richard's guests I'll send for Dr. Eustace.' The smile with which he rewarded this quip was distinctly dry, and then he asked: 'Where would you like to go? It's three o'clock, and I gather you were feeling bored or .you wouldn't have set out on an afternoon like this. Where can one go in a place like this when it's blowing half a gale and there's nothing to do?' 'Home,' she replied. 'To Bladon's Rock. Unless you were going somewhere special yourself? You can drop me if you were. I give you my word I won't melt.' 'What about tea somewhere?' he suggested, ignoring the bit about going anywhere special himself.' Couldn't we drive along the coast and find somewhere where they'll give us tea and scones and strawberry jam and have a little light conversation while we consume them? The affable conversation we usually indulge in!'

She looked at him curiously. 'Do you like tea and scones and strawberry jam?' 'I love them.' 'And weren't you going anywhere ... special?' 'As a matter of fact, I saw you set off, and I came after you,' he told her. She removed her headscarf and put it in her pocket, and then she fluffed out her hair with her hand and handed him back his handkerchief. 'Oh, no, I'd better keep it and wash it,' she said, withdrawing it hastily. But he commanded: 'Give it to me.' She handed it over. 'Are we going to have tea together?' he asked. 'If that's what you really want ...' 'I do,' he said, and smiled more dryly than ever. He let the car out and they travelled along the coast road for a distance of nearly thirty miles before they found a place where he decided it might be pleasant to stop. Valentine enjoyed the drive despite the rain coming at the windows because his was such a superbly comfortable car, and he drove in the polished manner she might have expected of one with his shapely hands and calm, confident jaw- line. Also—and this was a fact she had been trying

hard to ignore for the past fifty-six hours—he was the man with whom she had fallen in love. Not the first man she had loved, or had imagined for years she had loved, but the only man with whom she had fallen in love. There was something much more than a subtle difference, as she herself realized with an acute realization that was somewhat dismaying to say the least. The place where they stopped for tea had all the usual attractions, a room where the tables were decked with flowers and bright with colourful china, a log fire blazing on an open hearth because it was a wet, cold day, a waitress who seemed to like the look of them and suggested toast as there weren't any scones, and although there wasn't any strawberry jam the cake was good, and apparently Dr. Lamoine liked cake as much as he professed to like the other accompaniments of English afternoon tea. The conversation while they sat at tea was a little more wary than it had been when they had breakfast together, but after consuming two cups of tea and feeling pleasantly warmed by the fire Valentine at least began to feel less consciously on her guard against a man who might, or might not, be everything he seemed to be at the moment; and Lamoine's dark eyes ceased to wear that rather cynical half-smile they had worn all the afternoon. Beyond that she still felt that he was distinctly reserved, although he seemed to enjoy her company. On the subject of Roxanne he was deliberately reticent, she felt sure, and Sister Thibault was not a subject for discussion in his opinion. Any attempt on Valentine's part to extract information about Sister Thibault and her qualities as a nurse met with a somewhat disconcerting silence, or a noncommittal reply.

On the way home the rain stopped, and by the time they drew near to Bladon the sun was shining again and the sky was brilliant except for one or two racing clouds. It was six o'clock, and dinner at Bladon was not until eight o'clock, so Lamoine turned the car into the ravine that led down to the cove where they always bathed, and at that hour of the day the sands were golden as a wedding ring and steaming as the heat of the sun withdrew the moisture from the sand. The tide was out, and they walked down to the edge of the water and examined the rock pools. The limpets fascinated Valentine, and although she always refrained from attempting to dislodge them she never failed to wonder at the tenacity of the creatures, and to wonder what would happen if she did succeed in working one loose. Would it attach itself somewhere else, or would that be the end of it? She was sitting on a sun-warmed rock and running her fingers over one after the other when Lamoine, who had been staring somewhat moodily out to sea, noticed that one of the clouds was racing towards them at considerable speed, and would almost certainly release its contents on them as soon as it was immediately overhead. 'Come on,' he said. 'We'd better make for the car, or that cave over there is nearest, I think. Unless you want to be soaked through in a short time we'd better hurry.' Valentine had left her raincoat in the car, and she was wearing only a thin cotton dress that provided her with little protection. She ran nimbly over the sand towards the dark opening at the foot of the cliffs that she knew was an entrance to a whole series of caves, and Lamoine followed at a rather more dignified rate of speed. When he entered the cave she was laughing and flushed and

awaiting his arrival, and he looked at her sharply. For one moment the same compulsive atmosphere surrounded them that had surrounded them on the beach after she had been attacked by cramp. 'You're not cold?' he said, for the temperature of the caves was far lower than that in the sunshine on the beach. Instantly she withdrew a little, from him, and looked round her vaguely as if she was uncertain where to fix her glance, and was in danger of being lost if she didn't find something to rivet her attention on. 'No. No, not a bit.' 'All the same, I think you'd better have my coat,' and he removed it and draped it round her unwilling shoulders. 'Now you'll get pneumonia,' she said, shaken by the faint, attractive, masculine scent of the coat, and peeping at him cautiously. And resisting an urge to hug the coat close to her. He lighted a cigarette and stood staring out at the cataract of rain that was descending outside the cave opening, and his silence increased her awareness of him tenfold. Despite her withdrawal the low roof of the natural rock formation made it impossible for them to be far apart, and as the minutes passed and he said nothing she felt as if a kind of torrent was possessing her whole body. An urge to touch him, an urge to be on good terms with him shook her to her foundations; and she was battling against it and feeling as if the entire series of caves was full of the same electric tension that had preceded the moments when he kissed her before, when he turned to her abruptly and said: 'Well, what are you thinking?'

And then it tumbled out ... a defence of herself that she had to make. The removal of any grounds for criticism or contempt that had been strengthening over the past two days, and which she knew had affected his attitude towards her. 'It isn't true that Richard and I ... that Richard is the least bit interested in me! He's sorry for himself because he's made a mistake, and he was once in love with Roxanne. And now it's all over. He looks upon me as a kind of link with the past, and he's prepared to deceive himself about me, although I'm not in the least deceived about him. I'm still the Valentine with the freckles to him. And to me...' 'Yes?' Gaston said quietly, turning towards her. 'And to you?' 'When I was very young I adored him, I thought he was wonderful. I still thought him a kind of king among men up till a short time ago, and I was prepared to go through the whole of my life thinking of him as a kind of star that was out of reach, permanently out of reach.' Her colour was flooding her cheeks wildly, and her eyes were hanging upon his as if he had to believe her, and it was vitally important that he should believe her. But still he stood looking at her, making no attempt to cut her explanation short, not even appearing as if he was very much impressed by it. Until abruptly his face seemed to contort, and he exclaimed as if her name had been wrung out of him: 'Oh, Valentine!' And then she was in his arms, and his heart was beating violently against hers, and hers was fluttering like a wild thing against his.

'Valentine, Valentine!' He covered her face with kisses, and then he kissed the slender column of her throat, and her hair, and her eyes, and last of all her mouth. The kiss on the mouth lasted so long that they were both shaken as if there had been an upheaval within the cave when at last he lifted his head, and her goldenbrown eyes were gleaming like stars as she looked up at him. 'Why did you tell me all that?' he asked huskily. 'You know ... don't you?' she said. 'Yes, I know.' He sighed as if exquisite relief was flooding through him, and was supremely content. 'You love me, and I love you. It's as simple as that! Two people who met and weren't prepared to meet again, but who fell in love at first sight.' He tilted her chin and looked deep into her eyes. 'Did you believe in love at first sight before you met me, Valentine, my darling? My loveliest, loveliest woman!' The golden-brown eyes were limpid, transparent. 'I don't know what I believed. Except that I thought—I always thought ...' 'That Richard had been specially designed for you, and you couldn't have him? Sweetheart, I'm not in the least jealous of Richard—now. But I was after that night on the cliff when I saw the two of you together, and when I returned from London and found that he'd installed you in a kind of Rosamund's Bower in the tower. I should have realized after that kiss we exchanged on the beach that until that time you were completely unawakened, and that I awakened you. But a man in the throes of early love is not capable of sorting things out or arriving at sensible deductions. Richard was never a real man to you, only a glamorous shadow.

But because you hadn't met me you clung to the illusion. Now it's shattered for ever!' 'And when we met at that—that party he gave, why did you so resolutely turn your face against our meeting again?' she wanted to know. 'If—if, as you say, it was love at first sight.' He smiled at her tenderly, and stroked her cheek. 'I suspect it was just sheer obstinacy,' he replied. 'The obstinacy of the male when he resents being caught.' 'And there wasn't any—any other reason?' Her face flamed under the whimsical gleam that appeared in his eyes. 'Such as Sister Thibault, for instance? Or even Roxanne? You had me seriously linked with Roxanne, didn't you? At least, until a few years ago, when I grew tired of her and ditched her. That was what she wanted you to think, although there isn't a grain of truth in it. You'd better know the whole truth about Roxanne ...' holding her tightly to make the truth more palatable. 'I met her abroad, and I shan't say where, but it was when I was temporarily attached to a hospital where I was taking a course in a new line of treatment. Roxanne—Miss Bladon, as she was to me then, and, as a matter of fact, still is—was a patient at the hospital, and after her discharge I kept in touch with her because I thought there was a good deal I could do for her still. She was completely neurotic and had formed the drug habit, and I disliked abandoning her in a strange country where I could see nothing but complete disaster ahead for her.' He paused. Over Valentine's soft fair head he stared out to sea, and his expression developed a sudden touch of grimness. 'Doctors have a sort of fascination for some women, and your Roxanne proved to be that type of woman. She became infatuated

with me, and I'll say this for her, I don't think she'd ever been infatuated with a man before. She was a sufficient-unto-herself kind of woman until she met me, and she was so beautiful at that stage that I might have been excused if I'd gone overboard about her. But I didn't. My reaction was quite opposite!' He could feel Valentine clinging to him and quivering in his hold, and he once more put his fingers beneath her chin, lifted it, and looked deep into her eyes. 'I swear to you, darling, that she made no impression on me at all apart from arousing my pity. I was desperately sorry for her. I'm not easily impressed by women. In fact, I seem to be particularly resistant to them -' his dark eyes melted—'except in one case, when I must have been caught unawares, or it was too early in the morning to have my defences properly looked to. If you remember, sweetheart, we watched the sunrise together.' She nodded her head. 'I remember! I'll always remember!' with soft emphasis. Her hair was a pale golden cloud in the dimness of the cave, and he buried his face among it, and then kissed her hungrily. 'I seem to have waited a long time for this, and now I'm afraid . ..' He caught himself up. 'To return to Roxanne. She formed the idea that I was interested in her as a woman as well as a patient, and I had to disillusion her as gently as I could. But it wasn't much use being gentle with Roxanne, for she simply couldn't understand that I could resist her, and I had to make it clear that I had no interest in her. That, apparently, shook her to her foundations.' 'Poor Roxanne!' Valentine exclaimed, closing her eyes as if she suffered with Roxanne.

Gaston's face grew a little hard. 'It was poor me, at that time. She defamed me to my colleagues, and she would have done me all the harm she could, only there wasn't much harm she could do. I returned to England, and I don't know what happened to her, except that five years later I find her here in a physically far worse condition than she was then. She must have made some effort to give up the drugs, and her mind is more lucid than it was then. She seems to accept things. I feel sure she knows that it would be futile to attempt to put herself across to me again, but I'm not so certain that she won't revenge herself on me if and when she can. Sister Thibault, for instance ... what sort of a tale did she tell you about Sister Thibault?' Valentine looked faintly guilty. 'She said that you call her by her Christian name, and that she calls you by yours, which is unethical.' 'It certainly would be if it happened frequently, instead of on rare occasions, as a result of pure accident.' Both his voice and his look were grim. 'Marie happened to be engaged to my brother at the time he was killed in a car accident, and I'd got used to thinking of her as a member of my family. She works for me now because she needed a job, and as a fully qualified Sister she was an obvious choice for the nursing-home.' 'I see,' Valentine said. 'But is it necessary for Roxanne to have a fully qualified Sister to look after her?' 'She needs someone who can cope with her,' Gaston answered. 'At your expense?' she said. 'You're making yourself responsible for Roxanne, aren't you?'

'I can't do anything else,' he replied. 'As a matter of fact, she's been on my mind for years.' 'I'm sorry about your brother,' Valentine said quietly. 'It was a dreadful thing to happen.' But he turned away, as if he had other things on his mind. 'Let's go,' he said, rather abruptly. 'It's high time I was back and looked in on my patient, and I promised Sister Thibault to relieve her for an hour or so this evening.' 'There's no need for you to do that,' Valentine told him eagerly. 'I can sit with Roxanne. I can relieve Sister Thibault any time you wish.' But he shook his head without looking at her. 'Any time you do sit with Roxanne let her talk, but don't take in everything she says to you,' he cautioned. 'And I'd like to arrange it that you spend very little time with her alone. I don't trust her.' Valentine could have answered that at least he could trust her now, but they were walking towards the car across the beach, and although he had taken her hand and was holding it firmly she had the feeling that his thoughts had wandered from her. There was a noticeable cleft between his dark brows.

CHAPTER TWELVE BEFORE he started up the car, however, he turned to her and smiled in such a way that it melted her bones. He also carried her hand up to his mouth and kissed it lingeringly. 'Don't worry, sweetheart,' he said gently. 'Things will work out all right for us, and very likely for Roxanne. This time we may be able to cure her. I intend to make a great effort to do so, anyway.' Valentine smiled back at him mistily. 'I've always been very fond of Roxanne,' she admitted. 'I wish you could help her.' 'I'll do my best. But it may mean that we'll have to be a little guarded where she's concerned. I'm afraid we can't walk in and tell everyone that we're in love, and you're going to become my wife.' Her face instantly flamed deliciously. 'Am I?' she said. 'You haven't asked me,' with a demure dimple appearing at one corner of her mouth. 'You've told me that you're usually pretty resistant to my sex, but you haven't said anything about a wife.' His dark eyes refused to treat the matter lightly. 'Don't you want to become my wife?' he asked, with a kind of dangerous quietness. 'Is that something you'll have to have time to think about, and have I got to be patient until you've made your decision?'

'Oh, Gaston, no!' she answered, and he instantly took his hands off the wheel and caught her back into his arms and kissed her fiercely, and a little ruthlessly. 'That's the first time you've called me Gaston,' he said, with satisfaction. 'On your lips it sounds like a piece of music! Say, "Oh, Gaston, yes!" when I ask you formally to marry me the instant Roxanne looks as if her progress isn't likely to be interfered with when we break the news to her, and it'll sound like an angels' chorus.' And Valentine felt utterly happy and content as she lay back against the pale grey upholstery, for she knew it wasn't going to be necessary for him to ask her formally to marry him. They both knew that marriage—a lifetime together—was all that they asked if the future was to have any meaning. The first jolt to the slightly delirious quality of her happiness came when she entered Roxanne's room shortly before she went down to dinner. Roxanne had been sitting up in a chair all afternoon, and having returned to bed she now looked a little exhausted, and as if her nerves were somewhat tightly stretched and could snap if they were submitted to too much strain. 'Hello,' she said. She noted that Valentine was wearing a slim dress of white jersey silk that clung to her slender shape as if it loved it, and an antique silver and turquoise necklace drew attention to her lightly tanned and prettily curved neck. 'I wondered whether you were going to bother to look in and see me before you went down to dinner. I gather you had an enjoyable afternoon despite the rain?' 'You gather .. .?' Valentine looked surprised, and then gave herself away. 'But how did you know?'

'I didn't.' Roxanne's lips folded into a thin, taut line, and her hands moved restlessly on top of the sheet. 'But I haven't seen you looking so cheerful for days, and Dr. Lamoine was late in paying me his evening visit. He, too, looked cheerful, although he complained about the rain this afternoon. He said he went for a drive, and I know you went for a walk. Was it all arranged beforehand?' 'Was what arranged beforehand?' Valentine asked a little stupidly, and placed a couple of magazines she had bought for Roxanne on the bedside table. 'The meeting. The meeting between you and Lamoine. I don't imagine you went out in the rain for the pleasure of walking about in it.' 'As a matter of fact, that was what I did do,' Valentine told her, with a sudden touch of sharpness. 'You know I often like to go out in the rain, and I didn't feel like working this afternoon. I felt like walking. Dr. Lamoine came along in his car and picked me up. He asked me if I'd like to go for a drive.' 'And you said "yes", of course.' Roxanne's face was now actually working, and if it hadn't been for the lipstick on her lips they would have looked curiously white. 'You're asking for trouble, my sweet simpleton! Tomorrow it will be Sister Thibault's turn ... or some other day when she has a few hours off duty. I don't mind telling you she looked distinctly bleak when six o'clock arrived and our doctor didn't put in an appearance. She saw you go off for your walk, and she also saw you return.' 'Well, and what of it?' Valentine said. Roxanne shrugged her emaciated shoulders under the all-buttransparent bedjacket.

'Nothing, poppet. But I'd be careful, if I were you. You've never had a real affair before, and it would be silly to go in off the deep end for a man who isn't likely to go in off the deep end for you.' Valentine felt she must escape from the room before all her newfound happiness became slightly tarnished . .. although she made full allowance for the fact that Roxanne was an extremely sick woman, and to a sick woman the sight of another's happiness must be galling. Particularly when she suspected that it centred round the man with whom she had once been possessively in love. 'By the way,' she said, before she made an excuse and left the room, 'did you know that Sister Thibault was once engaged to Dr. Lamoine's brother? Only he was killed in an accident and the wedding never took place.' 'No?' Roxanne looked up alertly, and then her eyes smiled and the corners of her reddened mouth curved a little cruelly. 'Poor Val!' she exclaimed. 'Trying to explain away Sister Thibault. I suppose Gaston told you that he formed the habit of calling her Marie when he thought she was to become a member of his family, and the habit stuck!' Valentine's cheeks grew hot. 'It was a perfectly natural habit,' she defended. 'Of course. But doctors and nurses who work together leave habits outside the sickroom. Unless they've become so ingrained that they're rather more than a habit.' When she entered the library Valentine thought Richard looked at her a trifle ruefully. He put a glass into her hand, and then admitted that Gaston had told him their news, and that for the time being it was to be kept a close secret.

'I little thought when I took you back to my flat that time that I'd be putting a spoke in my own wheel,' he said. They were alone in the library, and he made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was a trifle dismayed. 'And to think that if I'd had any sense years ago you might now be Mrs. Richard Sterne!' Valentine was amazed that the fact that he himself said it shook her not at all. She had no feeling for him now whatsoever, save friendliness. She would always regard him as a very close and important friend. 'How do you know I'd have dropped like a ripe peach at your feet if you'd lifted your little finger?' she asked, perversely slightly vexed because it seemed he was prepared to assume quite a lot. He smiled at her in a somewhat one-sided fashion. 'Well, wouldn't you?' She smiled back . . . also in a somewhat one-sided fashion. 'Perhaps. Yes, I expect I would,' with sudden engaging honesty. 'But that was because you never noticed me in those days, and the fruit that is out of reach is always the most tempting fruit. Besides, I saw so much of you. You seemed to loom over the whole of my childhood and youth.' 'That makes me feel extremely old,' he remarked. Then he took one of her hands and kissed it with a kind of old-fashioned gallantry. 'You can't say you've seen a lot of Gaston, but apparently you've both discovered that it's enough. I hope it is,' with a slightly teasing air. 'It wouldn't do to make a mistake now that you've made it so plain you're no longer interested in me.'

Gaston entered the room, and Valentine turned to him with impulsive relief written all over her face. He gave her a long look, and then slid a hand inside her arm and turned to Richard. 'Have you congratulated her?' he asked. 'Or do you think she isn't the one to be congratulated?' 'I've commiserated with her,' Richard replied, not altogether truthfully. He smiled at them with his head on one side. 'I've also reminded her that she might be Mrs. Richard Sterne by now if she'd had a little more enterprise in the days when Richard Sterne interested her. But apparently she reserved all her real enterprise for you!' Dana Jorgensen and her mother came in together, and then Sister Thibault joined them before the dinner gong sounded. Dr. Lamoine turned to her and spoke quietly after he had drawn her to one side. 'I'll relieve you tonight, Sister, and you can have a few hours off. It's a fine night, and if you'd like to borrow my car it's yours.' But she replied with an unusually serious expression. 'I think I'll remain on duty tonight, Doctor. Miss Bladon is rather restless, and she's also a bit agitated. I don't think it would calm her at all if you sat with her. I think she'll be better with me.' They exchanged rather long and thoughtful looks. 'Very well,' he said. And then: 'If you have any trouble, let me know.' For once Valentine was placed next to him at dinner—she more than suspected that Richard himself was responsible for this arrangement—and afterwards he suggested a walk in the garden,

and a search for the seat near the cliff edge that Roxanne had once mentioned to him. When they found it at last it was too cool to sit down, for a stiff breeze was blowing inland from the sea, and despite the stars and the clear sky and the flowers hidden in the gloom it was not a night for lingering in such an exposed place. But there was an exhilarating feeling about being in such a high, secret place, with the sea spreading like molten magic below her, and the man that she loved so close to her side. Or so Valentine found. And when he said huskily that he ought to take off his coat and wrap it around her, and wrapped his arms round her instead, she felt as if the exhilaration had gone to her head. 'Oh, Valentine, Valentine!' His mouth was on hers, and the bright sea lurched, the whole garden running down to the cliff edge lurched. She clung to him in a kind of abandon that she had never dreamed herself capable of in the days when she had dreamed quietly of Richard, and had imagined that she would be completely happy if he so much as noticed her. Now she knew what it was like to be really happy, to have no desires beyond the all-consuming desire to be in one man's arms; and Gaston seemed as badly shaken as she was by the sheer desperation of their joint need. In addition, his Latin temperament made him a tender as well as a passionate lover, and the short time they spent in the garden was rather like a revelation to them both. Before they went in he took her face between his hands and looked at it out of dark eyes that seemed to blaze. 'Whatever happens we'll be married soon,' he said. 'We must be married soon!'

'But I'd rather wait until Roxanne is better, until she won't feel so badly when we tell her.' He looked away from her over the bright path of the sea. His face was sombre. 'She will never feel anything but badly about us,' he said. 'She was abusive when I saw her this evening. I don't know how much she guesses, but I think she guesses quite a lot. It's an extraordinary situation, because she has no real claim on anyone, and Richard can't be expected to have her for very much longer. If he marries Dana Jorgensen she won't want her there.' 'I could have her at the cottage,' Valentine suggested. 'I'm perfectly ready to look after her.' 'No!' Gaston said, and he spoke quite sharply. 'That is an arrangement that wouldn't work. In any case, I won't have it.' He continued to stare at the dimly seen horizon. 'She might consent to go into my nursing-home ...' 'I doubt it,' Valentine said, and he agreed with her. 'It's not very likely she'll be fit enough to earn her living for years, if ever.' 'Then I'll make the cottage over to her,' Valentine declared. 'And between us perhaps we could pay Duffy to look after her.' He stopped gazing out to sea and studied her tenderly. 'From all I've gathered she was never a particularly good friend to you,' he said. 'But you've already proved that you can be a very good friend to her. However, let's stop talking about her tonight. Let's talk about ourselves!'

He gathered her close again, and she felt absolutely breathless when at last he lifted his head. Looking up dazedly into his eyes, she felt that she was drowning in the liquid darkness of them. 'I've never even thought that I've loved a woman before,' he said. 'It's a strange thing, and now I know why.' Valentine remembered that Roxanne had called him monastic. And her whole being leapt with gratitude because he had waited for her to grow up. She was twenty-six and he was thirty-six. Ten years ago, when he was twenty-six, she was only sixteen. 'And now I know why,' he repeated, in wonder and in awe. 'It was because of you, my little love ... and there could be only one Valentine in any man's lifetime.'

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE next morning he drove her to the cottage, because she wanted to be certain that everything was all right there. They wandered round, inspecting the small rooms and examining window fastenings, and last of all they looked into the kitchen and she felt a trifle nostalgic because the kitchen is the hub of the home, and this tiny cottage had been her home for a few short weeks. It looked as if it might never be her home again, not in the real sense. For Gaston wanted to marry her as soon as he could do so without interfering with Roxanne's progress, and that meant that she would live with him in London, and the cottage would become a kind of holiday home, or something of the sort. She didn't intend to part with it ... unless Roxanne decided she would like to live in it. Roxanne was going to present a problem, and it was one that weighed on Valentine as she moved about the rooms. There was some sherry in a cupboard in the sitting-room, and she and Gaston toasted one another in some of it before they left the cottage. 'I've been thinking,' Valentine said as she looked down into her glass. 'If we could persuade Roxanne to live here it would be a good thing for her ... it's close to the sea, and she loves the sea. It's easily run, and she and Duffy could manage it between them. I know Duffy would have to do practically everything, but Roxanne might learn in time.' 'We mustn't preclude the possibility of Roxanne's marrying one day,' Gaston observed, as he too, stared thoughtfully down into his

glass. 'If we get her over this little lot, and she behaves sensibly, there's no reason why she shouldn't marry and lead a perfectly happy and normal life. If Richard, for instance, hadn't got himself engaged . ..' He looked up, and their eyes met. 'You don't think Richard has made a very wise choice in Dana Jorgensen, do you?' Valentine stated rather than asked. 'As a matter of fact, I don't,' he admitted. 'She's too young, for one thing ... that is to say, mentally young. She'll never be very much more adult than she is now, and it doesn't seem to me that she'll settle down at Bladon's Rock. A nice little place in Surrey, within easy reach of town, would be much more up her street.' 'I know,' Valentine said. Her slim brows puckered as she recalled that Richard had even talked of parting with Bladon's Rock. And he loved it ... even though he wandered away from it often, he loved it. And he was not the least bit in love with Dana Jorgensen. From every point of view it would be a most unsuitable marriage. 'Of course,' she said, 'it does seem a pity that Richard, after spending such a large part of his life pursuing Roxanne, should get himself involved with someone else just when Roxanne was ready to marry him. I know she had practically made up her mind to marry him when he turned up here with a fiancée.' Gaston's black brows drew together in a frown. 'All the same,' he said quietly, 'I don't know that I'd wish Roxanne on Richard now. Ten years ago, perhaps. But now!' 'You don't think she'd ever ... make him happy?' Valentine enquired just as quietly.

He smiled at her a trifle soberly. 'Not in the way I understand happiness.' When they returned to Bladon's Rock the atmosphere was somewhat highly charged because Richard and Miss Jorgensen had quarrelled during the course of the( morning. Richard was looking morose and even a trifle sullen—for him; and Dana Jorgensen had a slightly flushed look about her face, and overbright eyes. She also looked distinctly mutinous. When Roxanne made her appearance for the first time at lunch, and Valentine learned that Richard had devoted the better part of the morning to establishing her comfortably on the terrace and then sitting with her, she was not as surprised as she might have been that relations between the engaged pair were strained. Roxanne was wearing one of the new dresses Valentine herself had bought for her, and she had taken great pains with her. appearance. Valentine felt a mingling of pity and sympathy when she saw her wearing a faintly triumphant expression, and leaning on the arm of Sister Thibault. Gaston hurried forward and supported her on her other side, and within a matter of minutes she had been placed comfortably at the table, on Richard's left hand, and with Gaston as her other immediate neighbour. Miss Jorgensen, on Richard's right, and her mother, acting the part of hostess at the foot of the table, both looked as if this was something they had not bargained for when they accepted an invitation to Bladon's Rock. And although Valentine sympathized with them to a certain extent, her loyalty prevented her from sympathizing with them wholly; and when she thought of the days when Roxanne had lived here by right, and her mother had presided where Mrs. Jorgensen now presided, a certain resentment

on Roxanne's behalf attacked her, and she found it a little difficult to draw Miss Jorgensen into the conversation. For there was no doubt about it, Roxanne saw to it that she was the centre of attention while the meal lasted, and afterwards she was fully prepared to spend the remainder of the afternoon downstairs in the drawing-room if Gaston hadn't absolutely insisted that she return to her own room, and Sister Thibault accompanied her back to it. Later that afternoon, when Valentine saw Gaston for a short while on the terrace before it was necessary for both of them to start changing for dinner, she asked him what he thought of Roxanne's marked improvement, and in particular the marked improvement in her spirits and outlook. Gaston, who had just come from her room, looked thoughtful as he leaned against a stone falcon which decorated the terrace, and offered his cigarette case to Valentine, who was sitting on the balustrade. 'I don't know quite what to think,' he admitted. 'Except that she is improved. Last night she was in a very difficult mood, and I attributed it to the fact that you and I had spent the afternoon together, and she knew about it. This morning she appeared to have slept well, and her mood was almost sunny ... a mood which continued right through to lunch- time, and is still making her quite easy to handle. Richard says he noticed a marked improvement in her this morning, and it was his idea that she was brought out here on to the terrace, where, apparently, he devoted a lot of his time to her.' 'Miss Jorgensen didn't like it,' Valentine said.

'I'm not surprised. She isn't the type to take kindly to a nursinghome atmosphere, and I'm afraid Richard has turned his house into a refuge for a sick woman without any reference to his fiancée, who just plainly resents it.' 'Does she know he was once very nearly engaged to Roxanne? That she would be mistress here now if only she had acted sensibly instead of turning him down?' 'I don't know. I should think it's highly likely that someone's told her .. . possibly Richard himself. He's very open about things, and I don't think he cares sufficiently for Miss Jorgensen to spare her as much as he might.' 'I don't think he cares for her at all. I think .. .' And then Richard himself appeared on the terrace, and she fell silent. Richard's moroseness had left him, and there was even a slight jauntiness in the way he walked towards them along the terrace. He had been down to the beach, and he was looking very tanned, and his open-necked cream silk shirt and well-pressed grey flannel slacks made him look young and almost boyish. Valentine experienced a moment of surprise as she looked at him, and realized that her heart didn't flutter. But she experienced a deep sense of wonderment because Roxanne's had remained so impervious to him for so long. It was of Roxanne that he spoke immediately as he joined them, as if he had been thinking about her during the course of the afternoon. 'It was a good thing to get Roxanne out of that bedroom of hers, and let her mingle with the rest of us,' he said. He accepted a cigarette from Gaston, and then sat down almost contentedly on

the balustrade beside Valentine. 'I thought she was looking surprisingly well, astonishingly like her old self.' Valentine and the doctor exchanged glances. 'It also struck me that her trouble is that she's had a pretty rough time—financially, among other things—and you can't expect a woman brought up as Roxanne was brought up to take kindly to roughing it, and having to do without even the essentials of life.' He turned and looked at Valentine. 'She told me this morning that she had to borrow ten pounds from Duffy a few months ago, and that you paid Duffy back. That was awful!' Valentine wondered whether he meant that it was awful that she should have to pay off Roxanne's debts, until he corrected the delusion. 'That Roxanne should have to borrow from anyone! I don't mind telling you it shook me.' And he looked as if he was considerably shaken still. 'Of course, I told her that she's not to worry any more about money. As soon as she's fit enough to need it I'll open a banking account for her myself. And until she makes up her mind where she wants to live she must live here. This was her old home. It must become her home again.' 'And ... Miss Jorgensen?' Valentine asked. 'Does she approve of that arrangement?' Richard looked vaguely uncomfortable. 'As a matter of fact, she doesn't. We had quite a row this morning . .. but dash it,' his golden-brown eyebrows meeting above his level grey eyes, 'I can't cast off an old friend because Dana asks me to do so. I knew Roxanne long before I knew Dana, and I owe something to Roxanne, for all the years when —well ..

He made a slight movement with his shoulders and his hands, and he looked in an embarrassed fashion first into Valentine's eyes, and then into the less revealing ones of the doctor. Valentine thought, with an almost maternal feeling of sympathy and understanding and regret at the same time: Poor Richard! Is he going to become a kind of slave of Roxanne for the second time? Is she deliberately exerting the old influence over him? Isn't that quite dead yet? And if the influence continues how long will his engagement last? Dana and her mother were not well off, but they were not exactly poor, and she was quite extraordinarily lovely. She would have no difficulty in finding another man eager to marry her. A man who wouldn't expect her to provide a safe harbour for his first love, and have her in her house for as long as it suited the old love to remain there! Richard tossed his half-smoked cigarette over the parapet and on to one of his brilliantly green lawns, and then stood up looking purposeful. In fact, almost arrogantly determined. 'I mean to do all I can for Roxanne,' he said. 'Everything I can.' He strode away along the terrace, and Valentine rose also and looked a little deflatedly at the doctor. 'Shall we go in, too?' she said. 'I expect it's nearly time to dress for dinner.' But when they reached the foot of the short staircase leading up to her tower suite he went up with her, and inside the charming little sitting- room-cum-workroom he took her face between his hands

and looked at it as a man in need of a deep draught of water looks at a flowing stream. 'At least I'm lucky that you're not a Roxanne,' he said, a deep note in his voice. 'Even at her best she couldn't attract me, and if she had I'd have given myself up for lost. Richard seems pretty lost tonight... but you and I have each other.' As his arms closed round her she shut her eyes, and a delicious little shiver of ecstatic anticipation passed over her before his mouth covered hers. As soon as she could speak, but while she was still clinging to him and the room was inclined to revolve round her, she said: 'It doesn't seem quite fair. Richard deserves to be happy. If only she hadn't come back into his life!' 'It doesn't mean that she'll succeed in holding him this time.' 'I've got a kind of feeling that she'll do her best. He shouldn't have made it quite so clear to her that he isn't really in love with Dana!' 'I'll have to return to London for a few days,' he said. 'It may possibly be a little longer than that, but I'll be back the very first moment I can manage it, you know that.' She felt startled by the very thought of having him leave her. 'I can't think how I shall possibly survive without you,' she said, not caring that she was being completely honest and putting up no defences. He once more took her face between his hands, and this time he smiled as he looked at her.

'You survived very well before you met me,' he remarked. 'And while you imagined yourself entirely devoted to Richard. But I'll admit there's a great deal of difference between undemanding devotion and falling passionately in love. And I flatter myself that you do love me, little one . .. perhaps nearly as much as I love you!' 'Nearly as much.' She wound her arms tightly about his neck and held him possessively. 'A woman always loves more than a man. I think she can't help it. A man has so many other things to think about. A woman just concentrates on the man she's in love with.' He smiled whimsically. 'Perhaps,' he agreed, stroking her cheek. 'Perhaps. But a man does a lot of concentrating too, you know!'

CHAPTER FOURTEEN BEFORE he left Gaston had rather a long talk with Roxanne while Sister Thibault remained out of the room. When Valentine saw him after his long closed session with the patient who was paying him nothing she thought he looked unusually grave, and a trifle compressed about the lips; and when, after he had taken his departure, she went upstairs to have a word with Roxanne, she found the invalid moving about her room and looking by contrast almost cheerful, although there was a strange little glitter in her eyes as she watched her old friend move across the floor towards her. 'Hello, darling,' she greeted her, in her husky and at times almost musical voice. 'So Gaston has left, and you're feeling utterly lost! He told me about his plans for your future. You're going to marry him, and the two of you will live happily ever after! Well, I hope you will, but my knowledge of men doesn't incline me to feel overconfident on your behalf. However, you made so few demands when you thought yourself in love with Richard that you'll be content with crumbs if nothing more comes your way. And after all, you are twenty-six, aren't you? And time marches on!' 'You're thirty-two,' Valentine said, not knowing why she stooped so low as to rub this fact home when Roxanne was still an invalid. Unless it was the slight cruelty in her old friend's eyes as she studied her, and the sudden uneasiness that rushed over her because Gaston had taken the bull by the horns and admitted the truth to Roxanne. Which should cause Valentine secret rejoicing, since it was a clear indication that the man she loved was important to declare to the world that she belonged to him, and that he intended to marry her.

'Yes, I'm thirty-two.' Roxanne studied her reflection in the mirror, and as she had just made herself up carefully and she was wearing a charming housegown in a colour that had always spited her she could afford to smile. 'But I wouldn't say I was exactly finished, would you? Not quite a "has-been". Richard has taken to visiting me far more often than when I first collapsed here, and Richard was always fastidious. That's an indication I'm inclined to hug to myself. It gives me confidence when I feel low.' Valentine decided the moment was ripe to make a suggestion she and Gaston had agreed upon. 'I don't know what you intended to do when you're better,' she said, 'but I'm sure you appreciate the fact that Richard is engaged, and you can't stay here indefinitely.' 'Oh, that's all right,' Roxanne returned carelessly, still concerned with her own appearance in the mirror. 'Richard is going to make me an allowance, and I can live anywhere.' She touched one eyebrow delicately with an eyebrow pencil. 'The South of France ... anywhere!' 'But you haven't any real claim on Richard.' Far from it, Valentine thought .. . she had practically ruined Richard's life. And she was shocked because Roxanne accepted charity as if it was her right. 'No?' Roxanne glanced at her over her shoulder, and her scarlet lips were mocking. 'It all depends upon what you mean by having any claim on Richard. That stupid child he's got himself engaged to will never make him happy. She hasn't any claim on him, or even any right to respect, because she's marrying him for his money. And her mother's pushed her into it!'

'I think you're wrong,' Valentine returned quietly. 'Her mother's quite a nice woman, and Dana's quite strikingly beautiful. A lot of men with money would be happy to marry her.' 'A lot of men with money would have been happy to marry me when I was her age,' Roxanne declared, with a touch of viciousness. 'I was even more strikingly beautiful than she is, and I wasn't all exterior charm! I had so many things to commend me that a man who loved me when I was young still owes me something when I'm not so young.' Valentine started to pace up and down the room, thinking agitatedly—and she wasn't quite sure why she was suddenly so agitated—that it was one way of looking at it, and one way of justifying the sort of generosity Richard was likely to pour out over her. Because she had made Richard's life an agony for years, he could keep her in comfort for the rest of her days! 'Gaston and I were thinking—thinking about the cottage,' she said, coming to a halt beside Roxanne. 'We were thinking that you might like to live there —with Duffy to look after you, of course, if she's willing. So far as I'm concerned the cottage is yours, any time you want to start living there.' 'Thank you, darling,' Roxanne replied languidly, lighting a cigarette and watching the smoke curl upwards to the ceiling. Then she brought her look back to Valentine's face, and the strange glitter appeared in her eyes again. 'That's extraordinarily generous of you, my sweet, but I won't accept your offer at the moment because I haven't yet got down to the business of planning my future movements. It's extraordinarily generous of Gaston to agree with you ... and how charmingly natural that sounded! "Gaston and

I were thinking . .." You must have done a lot of shared thinking while I had no idea at all that you even knew one another at all well!' Despite the softness of Roxanne's voice, there was a note in it that affected Valentine like the sounding of a warning bell. Her eyes widened defensively. 'I think you know that I met Gaston at a party Richard gave. We don't know one another awfully well.. 'Then be careful, my dear ... be warned!' Roxanne's eyes continued to glitter through the haze of cigarette smoke. 'Even when you know a man awfully well you can't really trust him; but when you don't know him at all well ...' She shrugged her shoulders. 'Well, it's rather like asking for trouble, isn't it? But that's your affair, of course.'

Roxanne began to make rapid strides towards recovery. Her pallor lessened, and her cheeks grew fuller ... the lines magically blotted themselves out, and even the haggard look vanished. Even without make-up she ceased to look drawn and older than her years, and with make-up she was almost but not quite the old Roxanne ... scintillating, sparkling, beautiful. Richard spent many hours a day with her, carrying her out on to the terrace ... although by this time, and as a Result of such improvement, she was perfectly capable of walking out on to the terrace herself, and even of accompanying the rest of them down to the beach when they went there to bathe or sunbathe. Richard refused to allow her to even think about accompanying them into the sea, but she sat beneath a protective umbrella while

they disported themselves in the water, and smiled placidly when they rejoined her and Richard threw himself down at her feet and enquired anxiously how she was doing, and whether she found the sun too much, or the spot was too exposed, or the cushions of her portable chair were not as comfortable as she would like them. Richard was almost pathetic in his anxiety to build her up and set her on her feet again. He consulted Sister Thibault as to the quickest and surest methods of ensuring her convalescence, and drew up a daily programme for her patient which slightly amused the nurse . .. although as there was nothing harmful about it she couldn't disagree with it. Roxanne was not to be left alone as much as she had been, or with only Sister Thibault to keep her company. She was to be drawn into the circle of guests (and by this time it looked as if Dana Jorgensen and her mother were really nothing much more than ordinary guests), and special efforts were to be made to keep her amused. Richard himself selected books for her and thought up topics of conversation that would interest her. He mixed her special champagne cocktails (with the permission of Sister Thibault) before meals, and sent away for delicacies that she fancied. Such things as caviare and smoked salmon could not be obtained locally, but he secured them for her; and as she had a passion for fruit there was always an enormous basket of fruit at her elbow. He noticed that her wardrobe was limited, and got in touch with her old dressmaker in London and had a lot of new clothes sent down to her. Her old measurements were not so very much out, and the clothes fitted and had the effect of enlivening her whole personality. She was able to appear really glamorous in the evenings, cutting out Dana and making Valentine seem quite in the shade. She was even driven in by Richard to a local beauty parlour

—a new one that was a branch of a famous one in London—and emerged looking herself. Herself as she had looked ten years before. In the afternoons Richard took her for drives, and sometimes the others went with them. In the early evenings he sat with her on the terrace while everyone sipped aperitifs; and after -dinner he played chess with her, or two-handed rummy. He talked about installing a television set solely for her benefit, although he himself disliked television; and when it was time for her to go to bed at night he carried her up the stairs, and as soon as the nurse gave permission went in to see her comfortably settled in bed and to say goodnight. Downstairs Dana Jorgensen paced up and down the terrace, or the drawing-room floor—according to the clemency, or lack of clemency, of the weather —and looked as if she had already arrived at a decision, and was only waiting for an opportunity to break the news to Richard. She broke it to him late one night after everyone else had gone to bed, and in the morning Richard's long black car appeared on the drive, and Mrs. and Miss Jorgensen's luggage was carried out and stowed away in the boot—or as much of it as the boot would accommodate. It was arranged that the rest should be sent on. And after very formal leave-takings, and no regretful glances back at the house, the two women drove away with Richard at the wheel, courteously prepared to drop them at the local railway station. Valentine stood, feeling faintly appalled, in the hall, when they had left, and Duffy came to her from behind the green baize door that shut off the kitchen quarters and looked at her meaningly.

'I may be wrong,' she said. 'But I'm inclined to wish your aunt hadn't died when she did—not that I ever wanted her to die, poor soul! —and left you her cottage. For if you hadn't had the cottage you couldn't have put anyone up, could you? Not down here .. . and Miss Roxanne wouldn't have come back here at all.' Roxanne came silently down the stairs, wearing a crisp white linen sunsuit with a freshly picked gardenia—sent to her on her breakfast tray—attached to a partially bare lightly tanned shoulder, a knitting bag in her hands and a book under her arm, smelling delightfully of her latest costly bottle of toilet water, and smiled at them both with the assurance of a Cleopatra absolutely sure of her Antony. Unable to be surer, in fact. 'So they've gone, have they?' she said, the utmost satisfaction in her voice. 'It's a case of "He who laughs last", isn't it? When they arrived I was somewhat of an outsider ... You could almost say a back number! But when Richard returns from the station I think he'll have an announcement to make to you all.' The 'all' included the manservant and his wife, the two maids, as well as Valentine and Mrs. Duffy. They were asked to assemble in the library after the drinks had been poured, and Richard lifted his own glass and asked them to toast him—and Roxanne. 'At last I'm able to make an announcement I wanted more than anything to make years ago,' he revealed. 'Miss Bladon—' His eyes went to Roxanne and dwelt upon her with a light in them that was a revelation to Valentine, for it proved that he had never really recovered from his infatuation for the sixteen-year-old girl who had ensnared him on sight. 'Miss Bladon, after whose family this house is named, has at long last consented to marry me, and I'm the happiest man in the world!'

He undoubtedly was very happy. Whether Roxanne was as happy it was impossible to tell, but she was as satisfied as a cat with a saucer of cream, and more than that she was triumphant. Valentine could tell that from the way Roxanne met her eyes. Valentine felt inclined to choke over her champagne—possibly because one of the bubbles got up her nose and started her coughing a little, and sneezing—and although there was nothing more Mrs. Duffy enjoyed than a glass of champagne on occasions such as this, she set her glass down practically untouched on a table near to her and said that she had a soufflé in the oven and mustn't allow it to burn. 'If you'll excuse me, sir,' she said, 'I'll wish you happiness ... and I do wish you all the happiness in the world! ... and go and look at my oven.' When she had left the room the other servants disposed of their unexpected drinks hastily and also returned to the domestic quarters. Roxanne lay back comfortably in her chair, Richard lighted a cigarette for her, and Valentine spoke a little jerkily. 'I hope you'll be happy, too. I hope you'll be very happy!' 'Thanks.' Roxanne smiled at her dryly. 'That's nice of you, darling, very nice! Richard and I are sure we will be.' She allowed him to kiss her hand with every sign of being very much moved, held his eyes with her green ones until Valentine felt vaguely uncomfortable, and then announced that, as they had waited so long, they had made up their minds to be married almost at once. 'I'm strong enough to totter up the aisle of our lovely village church with Richard, and afterwards he's going to take me right

away for a long, long honeymoon in the sun. Isn't that right, darling?' appealing to Richard. 'That is absolutely right, sweetheart,' Richard agreed with fervour. Once again he kissed her hand, retaining it against his cheek. 'Even if we're away a year it won't matter to anyone except ourselves, and by the time we return you'll be one hundred per cent fit.' 'Doesn't that sound marvellous?' Roxanne demanded of Valentine. 'One hundred per cent fit, and a husband to take care of me!' Valentine murmured mechanically that it sounded absolutely wonderful. 'Why don't you and Gaston get married at the same time?' Roxanne suggested, her green glance swinging round to the girl who stood there unable to enthuse over the news she had just heard, and yet in a sense tremendously relieved. For in future Roxanne would be Richard's problem. 'Or if you don't like the idea of a double wedding, at least fix the date and let us know when it's going to be, and we'll send you something special in the way of a wedding present.' 'I—er—we haven't actually discussed marriage plans yet,' Valentine admitted. Roxanne smiled at her peculiarly. 'Then I should, darling, if I were you,' she recommended., 'You know the old saying, "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip!" You wouldn't want such an eligible man as Gaston to get away from you, would you?' That night a telephone call came through from London for Valentine, and she took it in the library. She was thankful Gaston

had chosen an hour when the library was deserted, and she was also so grateful for the sound of his voice when he spoke that she was quite incoherent for a few seconds. 'How's everything?' he asked. And then, a little more tonelessly: 'How's Roxanne?' Valentine told him the news. If he was surprised, he didn't betray it at his end of the wire, but he did make the comment that Richard hadn't waited very long after severing his attachment to Dana Jorgensen. 'However, from most points of view it's a good thing, I'd say,' he further commented. 'Richard has been like a piece of driftwood for years, and Roxanne has hardly profited from her independence. They'll probably make one another extremely happy, and at least her financial problem will be solved. Richard's coffers appear to be bottomless.' There was a pause, and then he said: 'In view of this I'll be with you fairly soon. I'd like to congratulate Richard ... and, of course, Roxanne. She is the one to be wholeheartedly congratulated.' 'I'm longing to see you,' Valentine said huskily. 'It seems years since you went away.' 'Darling,' his voice was deep with tenderness. 'To me it seems like several decades since I saw you last. But this engagement provides me with the excuse to leave here sooner than I intended. And it also means that you and I can be married whenever we wish ... whenever you're prepared to marry me, that is!'

'Roxanne suggested a double wedding,' Valentine told him breathlessly. 'But I don't think I'd like that, somehow.' 'No. When we're married we'll be married on our own, with just a few friends of our own choosing. And by that time Richard and Roxanne will be away on their honeymoon, I expect.' 'They're going to have a very long honeymoon.' His voice was gently teasing as he replied: 'You and I will be lucky if we can spin it out to three weeks. But then if you'd wanted a long honeymoon you should have married Richard while you had the chance, and not a busy London doctor. I'm afraid you won't have nearly so much fun with me as you might have had with Richard.' 'Don't be silly,' she said, her voice a little tense. 'My sweet, forgive me,' he pleaded softly. And then, urgently: 'Take care of yourself, sweetheart! I wish there weren't so many miles between us, but I'll be with you soon.' And Valentine went upstairs to her room in a haze of happiness, glowing from head to foot with it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Two days later Roxanne's engagement ring arrived from London, a magnificent diamond that Richard ordered over the telephone. Once he had slipped it on to her finger, and she had expressed herself as completely satisfied with the lovely blaze of brilliant fire that shot out from the slender whiteness of her hand, Richard suggested a celebration lunch at a nearby hotel that was poised right out on the tip of the headland overlooking the sea. When they returned from it Roxanne was looking just a little exhausted, but Sister Thibault, who had made one of the lunch party, assisted her upstairs to her room to rest, and by evening she was sparkling and alive once more. The next morning they all went down to the beach, and although Roxanne didn't bathe she sat under her sun umbrella while Sister Thibault proved what a very fine swimmer she was, and Valentine also enjoyed the warmth and the silky feeling of the water, and Richard swam strongly out to the island and examined an old boat that was beached on it once he got there. Sister Thibault obviously enjoyed her swim, but she never forgot that she wasn't at Bladon's Rock to enjoy herself, and somewhere about the middle of the morning she dressed and returned to the house to do a few routine chores and bring up to date her medical report on Roxanne. The latter watched her go, and somewhat contemptuously observed that she did her employer credit, for she was always meticulous about everything she did. 'Gaston was always like that,' she observed to Valentine. 'He took his doctor's oath very seriously even in the days when he wasn't much of a doctor, and a patient had a pretty thin time if she thought she was going to be noticed by him -except as an

interesting subject for study and the advancement of medical science. A woman patient, I mean.' Valentine looked at her curiously. For a happily engaged woman she still obviously nursed a good deal of bitterness against Gaston Lamoine, and it was a deep-rooted bitterness that might be hard to eradicate. Valentine was suddenly glad that she and the friend she had never completely understood would be seeing rather less of one another soon, once Richard took her away on that prolonged honeymoon he was looking forward to. For to be in love with a man and hear him thus criticized unreasonably was almost more than she could endure without taking up the cudgels on his behalf in a manner that might silence Roxanne effectively. Roxanne plainly realized that she could not make statements of the kind she had just made without awakening some kind of resentment in Valentine, and she looked round at her with a cool smile on her lips. 'You didn't like that, did you?' she said. 'Even although it was actually a compliment to your precious Gaston you didn't like it.' 'You didn't mean it as a compliment, did you?' Valentine said. Roxanne smiled less pleasantly. 'No, as a matter of fact, I didn't. I'm sorry, Val, but the man you're going to marry is not my ideal man. He's cold and inhuman, as you'll probably find out if you ever do marry him.' 'If he'd fallen in love with you when you fell in love with him five years ago would you say that now?' Valentine asked, with a kind of deadly quietness. Roxanne looked momentarily surprised.

'So you know the full story, do you?' she said softly. 'Gaston told you, I suppose. Well, that's another reason for disliking him I can add to my list! Cold, inhuman, self-satisfied, not even a gentleman! I suppose he told you I was desperately in love with him and made his life a nuisance? Well, I thought I was in love with him, but he soon cured me himself ... although he wasn't able to do much for the physical condition I was in at that time. In fact, he abandoned me when I needed help most.' 'Is that absolutely true?' Valentine asked, beginning to tremble inwardly as a result of the resentment she felt because she knew it was not true. 'Can you expect me to believe it's true when you've done everything you can think of to turn me against Gaston ... even now, when you know I'm going to marry him, and you're going to marry Richard, whom you treated badly for years!' Her voice was rising as her indignation got the better of her. 'But for your own stupidity and selfishness you could have been married long ago, and there would never have been any need for Gaston to try and help you overcome the habits you'd formed.' Roxanne whitened. 'Such as?' she said. 'You don't need me to tell you that,' Valentine replied. She stood up, a slender figure in her dark blue swimsuit, fighting for the reputation of the man she loved. 'The inside of your handbag when you arrived at my cottage would have convinced me of quite a lot if I'd examined it at the time, and since then you've been anything but an easy patient here at Bladon's Rock. You've taken everything for granted—all the consideration you've received—caused Miss Jorgensen to break off her engagement when she might have turned out a much better wife for Richard than you will ever be, and attempted to break up something you knew was growing

between Gaston and myself by first of all trying to turn me against him and then dragging in Sister Thibault as a kind of proof that women were a weakness of his, after you'd accused him of having monastic tendencies simply because he didn't fall in love with you!' She picked up her beach bag and turned away. 'Well, I've known you for years, and there was a time when I was quite fond of you, but I'm beginning to be glad that we shall soon be far away from one another . .. and we needn't ever meet again unless we desperately want to!' 'You forget,' Roxanne reminded her, with rather a bright colour on her cheekbones, and the old, strange glitter in her eyes, 'that Richard and Gaston are good friends. They will want to meet sometimes !' 'Not if you poison Richard's mind against Gaston as you've tried hard to poison mine 1' 'By the way, where is Richard?' Roxanne asked quietly, as if she expected to find him near to her. She looked towards the island, and at the clear sea, and it was true there was no sign of him. 'I thought I saw him dive off the point over there a few minutes ago, out of the tail of my eye, but he's nowhere about now.' She too stood up, her brilliantly green eyes searching the gently heaving sea. Far out something small and dark showed, and she indicated it in sudden agitation. 'That's him! And he's so far from shore that he must be in difficulties. Richard wouldn't swim out as far as that when he knows I'm watching, and for no purpose, as it's far beyond the

island! The current is so strong here that it's bearing him right out to sea. Perhaps he's got cramp!' The word was enough for Valentine. She dropped her beach bag and the rest of her paraphernalia and ran down to the edge of the beach, wading out into the water until it was up to her waist, and then striking out strongly. She was glad now that she hadn't overtired herself that morning, playing about on the fringe of the water rather than in it—since her own alarming experience of cramp she had been nervous of venturing out too far. But now Richard's life might depend on her prowess as a swimmer, and she really was an exceptionally fine swimmer. Her limbs were rested and her blood was warm. She clove a passage through the water that would have delighted the heart of an onlooker, but the only onlooker was Roxanne ... and she could be excused feeling admiration at such a time. Her anxious eyes were scanning the water and the dark speck that seemed to be receding moment by moment, and as Sister Thibault made her way down to the beach to rejoin her and remind her of the special elevenses contained in a Thermos flask in a specially packed basket she was clutching her hands and looking tormented. Valentine could no longer see the dark speck ahead of her, but her sense of direction was good, and she knew she was heading in the right direction. The sun struck down hotly on her unprotected head, but the water all at once seemed to be cold ... she must have entered a cold pocket, or got caught up in some kind of cold air stream. Her slim brown arms flashed as the sunlight poured over her, her white cap showed up as white as a gull's wing against the dark heaving blueness of the water surrounding her. On the beach—far,

far away as it now seemed to Valentine—Sister Thibault stood pointing and gesticulating, and someone with a body as brown as Valentine's but many times stronger dived into the water and set out to reach her. Valentine was beginning to feel confused by the brightness of the sun, the deep, intense blue of the sky, and the brilliant glitter of the water itself. She even began to wonder whether she was, after all, heading in the right direction, and looked about her rather wildly for the black speck which, if it was still afloat, meant that Richard was still holding out even if the cramp was bad. She summoned up enough breath to call his name several times over the limitless surface of the water, but when no answer reached her she knew she hadn't enough breath to call any more. She was growing tired rapidly, and the confusion inside her head was increasing, and she actually began to wonder what she was doing so far from the protection of the shore and whether it wouldn't be a good plan to turn and head back to it. And then she remembered Richard, and all the things she had said to Roxanne that morning .. . such a short time ago. And now Roxanne was enduring an agony because Richard was in difficulties, and it was up to her to reach him, if she could! But she couldn't. She was beginning to be in difficulties herself, and she was more or less completely exhausted. She tried to rest herself for a few seconds, but she hadn't the strength to turn over on her back and float ... and in any case, the tide was terrific out here beyond the island, and the underwater currents were pulling her apart. The world of sea and sky was engulfing her, possessing her ... and this time there was no Gaston on hand to come to her assistance.

When the cramp set in in earnest she knew that she was finished, and she couldn't even make wild threshing movements with her arms to force her backwards through the water. She was just hurled about from enormous wave to enormous wave, and any moment now one larger than the rest would suck her down with it as it receded. Gaston, she thought, almost peacefully ... they had known one another such a short time, but there had been some wonderful moments. It was odd, they had really got to know one another in the water, and now the water was taking her away from him. She remembered the river, and Richard's flat overlooking it, the tugs and the barges, and the sun coming up . .. Gaston saying, 'We may meet again. People blunder into one another sometimes!' And Roxanne saying spitefully, 'He's cold and inhuman!' Roxanne had won after all. For of course, that hadn't really been Richard's head in the water, for now she remembered seeing Richard making for the short flight of steps that led up from the beach to the grounds of Bladon's Rock. He had gone up soon after Sister Thibault, calling over his shoulder—only neither she nor Roxanne had heeded him—'I won't be long!' Clever Roxanne, Valentine thought dreamily ... relentless Roxanne, unforgiving Roxanne ... fatal Roxanne! Someone was swimming alongside her and jerking her out of her apathy, and then she was taken in tow and she had no clear idea what happened after that. On the beach, while they worked over her, Richard stood towelling himself and hardly noticing Roxanne ... and Roxanne remained apart, cold, comfortless, remorseful, perhaps, but perfectly silent.

It was Sister Thibault who was using all her craft to restore the circulation to Valentine's frozen limbs, and force her to eject the water that she had swallowed ... and it wasn't only Sister Thibault who was working so tirelessly. Gaston was there and directing every move she made—everything they both did—and his face was so white that he, too, might have been drowned out there in the cold, remorseless sea. She put out a hand to him because the sight of him worried her desperately, and then was violently sick. Later he wrapped her in her bathrobe and picked her up in his arms and carried her up the beach. Sister Thibault followed, and Richard said urgently: 'Let me carry her. Gaston, give her to me. You've had a shock.' But Gaston refused to surrender her, and Sister Thibault hastened ahead to put hot water bottles in Valentine's bed and reassure Mrs. Duffy about her safety. Between them they got Valentine into bed, and downstairs in the library Richard poured a stiff drink for Gaston, and then poured another one for himself. Roxanne came slowly up from the beach. 'If it hadn't been for you,' Gaston said, looking in a curious sightless manner at Richard, 'she wouldn't still be alive.' 'Naturally I dived in as soon as I heard what had happened,' Richard returned. 'I'm used to these currents, it was nothing to me. But Valentine mustn't bathe here alone in future.' Gaston looked hard at Roxanne as she entered the room. She knew that any hatred she had ever felt for him ,was nothing to the

consuming desire to revenge himself on her that was seething through his veins. 'Valentine will never come back here to Bladon's Rock,' he said. 'I'm taking her away from here today, and she'll never come back!'

CHAPTER SIXTEEN BUT Richard persuaded him to change his mind about that, and Valentine herself urged him to have second thoughts. As soon as she was feeling more like herself, and revelling in the luxury of having him sitting beside her bed, she put out her hand to him coaxingly and did her utmost to remove the dark and sombre crease between his brows, and the even darker and more sombre look in his eyes. 'We don't want to make Richard feel responsible,' she urged. 'It was Richard who saved me.' 'I know. I'm not likely to forget that.' But to counteract the sharpness of his tone he bent over her and smoothed the soft hair back from her brow, and she saw him swallow hard. 'Do you think I could forget it? But for Richard you wouldn't be here!' She drew his face down to hers and kissed his tormented eyes. 'It was intended that I shouldn't drown, so try and look at all the fortunate things that happened today! Your arrival, for one thing ... Sister Thibault wasting such little time in getting hold of Richard. She knew he's a far better swimmer even than she is, and she was needed on the beach after Richard brought me in. If she'd exhausted herself she wouldn't have been able to help you, and Roxanne -' 'Don't talk about Roxanne to me,' he said. 'She sent you out there to drown! She knew very well Richard was in no danger, but the black speck she pointed out to you was a long way out, and by the time you reached it you would almost certainly be in difficulties as these waters are highly dangerous. She'd heard that you'd had cramp before, and she hoped that you'd get it again . .. and she

thought both Richard and Sister Thibault were safely out of the way!' Valentine felt suddenly appalled. But still she couldn't quite believe it. 'If that was her intention when she invented the story about Richard I'm sure she regretted it afterwards. Roxanne isn't—isn't a killer.' 'I don't know what she is,' he answered, his voice as hard as rock. 'But I do know if Richard marries her he'll regret it. However, that's up to him. What I'm going to do is get you out of here.' 'When? Not today?' 'Tomorrow is my deadline. I'm taking you back to London to my flat, and if you want a chaperone, my old aunt will come and stay with us. It's a roomy flat, far too roomy for a bachelor. But I don't intend to be a bachelor long,' burying his mouth in the palm of her hand. 'I intend to set everything in motion that has to be set in motion so that we can be married immediately!' 'And you'll let me see Roxanne before I go? She sent a message up half an hour ago asking to see me.' His mouth became so hard that she hardly knew him. 'Do you want to see her?' 'I'd like to. I can't just go away from here not knowing what is going to happen to her ... and Richard. Poor Richard is the unfortunate one in all this.'

'This morning I thought I was the unfortunate one,' he said with a wry twist to his lips. 'However, if you really want to see Roxanne, I'll raise no more objections. But I insist on remaining outside in the corridor on call. And I mean ... on call!' When Roxanne entered the room she looked very different from the assured Roxanne of the morning. There was nothing in her face that indicated she was really sorry, but her eyes gave her away ... and they were frightened. Valentine knew why she was frightened. No one could prove that she had deliberately sent Valentine to her death—or at least deceived her about the need to rescue anyone—but Richard would always suspect her of the worst motive. She had seen him go up the steps, and she had known he was in no danger ... but because of a bitter grievance and an increasing and unreasoning resentment directed against her childhood friend she had yielded to the temptation to get rid of her. Through Valentine she could really get back on Gaston ... and that, this morning, had been her consuming desire. Valentine was up by this time, and sitting in a chair by the window of her sitting-room. She looked pale and wan, but otherwise not very much the worse for her experience. And the fact that Gaston was in the corridor provided her with a wonderful sense of consolation. 'I suppose you think I'm beneath contempt?' Roxanne observed as she sank down rather limply in a chair. 'I know Gaston thinks it would be safer for the world at large if I was put away somewhere,' her lips twisting. 'But I'm not mad. And I'm not yet a drug addict.'

'Of course you're not a drug addict,' Valentine said quietly. 'And when you're married to Richard life will be so different that you'll never be in danger of becoming an addict again.' 'Do you think Richard will want to marry me, now?' she asked, her lips twisting still more. Valentine reflected for a moment, and then answered honestly. 'Yes, I think he does. In fact, I know he does. Richard is a lonely man, you know—a rich man, but a lonely man—and such a large part of his life has been devoted to loving you. If you, in your turn, could devote the rest of your life to loving him ...' A faint colour struggled into Roxanne's face, and her green eyes grew suddenly eager. 'He hasn't said anything about—about breaking off our engagement. And if he doesn't, I—I'll prove that I'm not as hopeless as everyone thinks, and make up to him for those years you've mentioned before. But, honestly, it wasn't all my fault. If Richard had been more of a he-man—more like Gaston, who is standing guard on this room outside in the corridor, determined to give his life for you if necessary,' with a dryness that couldn't hurt Valentine any more, because she knew it was true —'and had run off with me or something like that when I was young and stupid, and didn't really know what I wanted, then today I might be the happy and contented mistress of Bladon's Rock, and you wouldn't have nearly lost your life.' Valentine extended a hand to her, but Roxanne pretended she didn't see it. 'Give me your word that you will settle down here, and you will be happy,' she said. 'And I'll give you my word that once I've left

Bladon's Rock with Gaston I'll never again think of what happened here today. And some time in the distant future—not too distant, perhaps—when Gaston too has forgotten, we'll come back here to stay with you and Richard, and you'll come to stay with us. All the years that we've known one another mustn't be allowed to go for nothing.' Roxanne suddenly put back her head and laughed ... and then the laughter died in her throat. Her expression altered completely. For the first time for years she was the old Roxanne, the old, friendly, frequently warmhearted, unexpectedly easily touched Roxanne. And she rose and went across to Valentine's chair and bent over her. She kissed her quickly, and then she kissed her again. And then she went back to her chair, and Valentine knew she would make a supreme effort, once she had left the room, to forget her weakness. 'I'll try to behave myself in future,' she said quietly. 'But, whatever happens, I'll never inflict myself on you again. I'll get by somehow myself, if it's necessary. But I'm depending on. Richard to make it unnecessary. And now I want to say thank you for taking me into your cottage, for buying me all those things, and for being willing to let me live in the cottage for the rest of my life if that was what I wanted.' Just before she left the room and disappeared into the corridor she waved a casual white hand with Richard's diamond blazing on her engagement finger. 'I'll send Gaston in to you,' she said. 'Assure him you're all in one piece ... still!'

And then she vanished, and Gaston came back into the room with a purposeful stride. He lifted Valentine out of her chair and held her against his heart. 'Ships that pass in the night,' he said. 'I've an idea Roxanne's is sailing away, but we'll probably hear about it from time to time. And her!' 'And Richard,' Valentine said confidently. 'I think they'll start out, at least, on the same voyage!'