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for the most part elderly, being chiefly retired army and naval men, doctors, clergymen, schoolmasters, and business men who had retired here with their wives. Their grown-up families had gone elsewhere for a livelihood, since there was little here to occupy them. How then should a girl of Logie’s age find any of the things that youth desires and needs in these surroundings? Jane, too, when her turn came?
    Presently, as she began to clean the silver, Alison squared her shoulders and her lips took on a happier curve. She had found escape, as she had often found it in the past, in an imaginary world where she retreated when the realities of the world of everyday became oppressive.
    This morning, in that other world, some distant cousin of whose existence she had never heard left her a fortune. All of them equipped with ravishing new clothes, she and Logie and Jane set out for Switzerland, where Jane was left at a boarding school where she was rapturously happy. Alison then took Logie to an hotel, where they made charming friends who invited them to stay in London on their return to England. Logie was taken to theatres and dances and fell happily in love with an adoring and delightful young man, possessed of enough money to ensure that no financial cares should come her way. They bought a charming country house where Andrew on his leaves and Jane in her holidays might make a home with them, and all lived happily ever after. And Alison was freed to take up the threads of life in Edinburgh, renew old friendships, take up forsaken interests, stretch the wings that had so long been cramped.
    Guiltily she came back to earth as sizzling noises and a most unpleasant smell proclaimed that the hens’ food was boiling over.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    Logie, fastening the belt of the white overall Alison had cut out for her from a linen sheet brought from Swan House but never used, since it was a double one, ran down the steep flight of steps from Fantails into the stable yard. As she was opening the gate in the low wall dividing it from the doctor’s garden, the church clock began striking nine, telling her that after all, she wasn’t late—she could be in the surgery by the time the last stroke of the hour rang out.
    It had been raining in the night. Silver drops hung on the nets over the raspberry-canes, and glittered in the sun on every leaf and petal. The shining air was sweet with roses and sweet-peas, and spiced with currant-bushes, mint and thyme, and all their fragrant neighbours in the herb bed. Logie’s depression lightened as she hurried down a path between box hedges, flanked on one side by fruit bushes, on the other by a wide flower border. On such a day as this it was impossible not to feel a gay conviction that something lovely must be waiting round the corner!
    “I feel gay,
    As well I may,
    For something nice Will happen to-day!”
    she chanted, laughing at herself.
    Opening the garden door she wondered, as she wondered every morning, whether the Sinclairs were acclimatised by years of custom to the faint astringent smell of disinfectants that pervaded Swan House. It had been architecturally impossible to make a separate door for surgery and waiting-room without spoiling the character of the Queen Anne home, and so the smells of home and practice mingled in the hall and passage, where, as she entered, Mrs. Sinclair was conferring with the elderly woman, Mrs. Moffat, who came from eight to twelve, and who for some time had been her only help.
    The doctor’s wife was short and dark, and always managed to seem cheerful, no matter how she felt. She had dark, sparkling eyes, a round face with strong features, and even white teeth that showed a good deal when she smiled, which happened often. Her age was forty-nine. She was by reputation and in fact the most discreet woman in Market Blyburgh.
    “Good morning, Logie! Such a lovely morning, too! The Doctor’s only just begun his breakfast. He had a call to Mrs. Chiffin in