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refuse a reasonable offer for the property? I could make it a very good offer, if I was driven to it—too good to be refused. As for Shirley, could it have really been as bad as she led you to suppose? She married Theo, didn’t she? And after the boy was born, she went back to him. Or was the lure of money too strong for your empty-headed little sister?’
    Kate sighed and put her head down while she remustered her forces. ‘My sister is dead,’ she spat at him, ‘and empty-headed or not, I loved her. I don’t think there can be much love in your family, Mr Manfred, so you wouldn’t understand. As for my friend Helen, she’s been a good friend, but she has to live the same as everybody else. You wouldn’t know about that either, you’ve never had to bother about the pennies. Yes, Helen’s an artist, and if her pictures don’t sell, she has to look around for some other way to keep herself and buy materials for her next pictures so she can try to sell those. If she sold you this cottage, I wouldn’t blame her a bit nor think any worse of her for doing so.’ She looked up at him wearily. ‘Oh, it’s useless trying to ex plain to you. You haven’t been there, you just don’t know! You sit in your superior seat and pull strings so that poor fools like me jump about like puppets because we did what we had to do, whether we liked it or not.’ Futile, silly tears sprang to her eyes and slowly trickled down her cheeks. ‘I’ll still fight,’ she whispered huskily.
    ‘With what?’ Calmly he produced cigarettes and a lighter. ‘You have nothing to fight with, Kate, not one single weapon—and besides, you’ve forgotten something.’ He sounded almost amused. ‘You’ve flung a great number of insults about, you’ve insulted my mother, you’ve insulted my brother, who can no longer defend himself, and you’ve insulted me. This is a lonely cottage and I could exact payment for those insults, a very pleasant payment, and who would believe you if you said I forced you?’
    ‘And will you leave money on the table as your brother did to my sister?’ Kate’s voice was hoarse with bitterness.
    ‘There may be no need if you’re reasonable.’
    ‘Oh, I’m reasonable,’ she looked hate at him. ‘I know when I’m beaten.’
    ‘Good! That, then, is the end of the preliminaries. We can now get down to some serious business.’ Thoughtfully, he studied the burning end of his cigarette and pushed the case and the lighter across to her. ‘I prefer to bargain from a position of strength, and in this case my position is so strong that I don’t have to bargain at all.’
    She pushed the case and lighter back across the table to him with a slight shake of her head. ‘I don’t smoke.’
    ‘No vices?’
    Kate ignored the question.
    ‘No, as you say, you don’t have to bargain with me, you’ve just proved that!’ She felt unutterably weary and went slack in her chair, drained of everything but the deep abiding hate which had kept her going for so long. ‘Whatever you have in mind, it won’t be a bargain, it’ll be an ultimatum.’
    ‘Have you any food in the house, Kate?’
    She looked at him in surprise, watching as his long fingers extinguished the cigarette efficiently. There seemed to be a calm content about his mouth. His next words surprised her even more.
    ‘I think you’ve been living in fear ever since your sister died, and it was all unnecessary, you know. I saw you at the funeral and I would have spoken to you then, but you slipped away like a black ghost. One minute you were there under the tree and the next, you’d gone. It would have been better if you’d waited. You could have saved yourself all these months of flight and fear. You had reason to fear,’ he admitted. ‘You knew I would find you. Now the fear is over and you’re tired. You need food and so do I—there’s a lot of me to maintain, as you can see. I suggest we eat and have a civilised conversation.’
    ‘Civilised!’