She began to protest, to say that people would talk, but Sam Trewin just chuckled. ‘Shut up and go to sleep. I promise I’ll take the greatest care of you and not do anything to frighten or upset you,’ he said, and now his voice was serious. ‘Goodnight, Glenys. Remember, you saved my children, so I could never harm a hair on your head.’

Glenys gave one last despairing wriggle and managed to put several inches between her back and Sam Trewin’s chest, but the cold draught which whistled into the gap was so unpleasant that she hastily returned to her former position. Sam chuckled. ‘Good girl. We have to share our warmth or we’ll end up frozen solid,’ he said. ‘It’s not as if there’s a soul for miles around who could offer us any better shelter. Just relax; morning will come soon enough.’

‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ Glenys said dreamily. ‘Goodnight, Sam . . . oh!’ Her neat, schoolmistressy bun of hair had come loose as soon as she removed her headscarf, and now she felt Sam’s hand smoothing it away from the back of her neck.

‘Why oh?’ he asked.

‘Because – because you called me Glenys and I called you Sam, and I was determined to stick to Mr Trewin,’ Glenys said after a pause. ‘Oh, Sam, I’m so sleepy!’

And Glenys Trent, schoolmistress, was fast asleep.

Glenys awoke. It was still dark and for a moment she wondered where she was. Then she remembered vaguely that yesterday she and someone else – she could not remember who – had been fighting their way through a blizzard. She had been so cold! But then she and her companion must have reached both shelter and safety, and now she felt warm as toast and happier than she had felt for many a long day.

It was tempting to put the blizzard out of her mind and let herself sleep once more; after all, it could not be very late, for there was no sign of stirring from the house around her. But which house was it? Was it the house with eight steps owned by the woman with the funny name, or was it the farm that she and the children had found at the very end of a long and tiring search?

Glenys sighed. She was too tired to struggle out of bed just to find out which house she was in. She was sliding down a pleasant hill into sleep once more when somebody, somebody close to her, gave a tremendous yawn. At the same moment she realised she was not alone in what she had believed, only seconds earlier, to be a large and comfortable bed. She frowned in an effort to remember just where she was. She knew Mo was quite capable of climbing into bed with her, had done so several times, but the yawn had not sounded as though it came from a little girl. Suddenly she realised that the arms which were holding her did not belong to a little girl either. Shock, like a bucket of cold water, washed over her and she struggled upright as memory flooded back. She had been trying to get back to Mrs Buttermilk’s tall house in Ruthin, and Sam Trewin had insisted on escorting her. Now she remembered. Within perhaps thirty minutes of leaving Weathercock Farm the blizzard had caught them unawares, and they had lost their way. Unable to see the weathercock on the old barn which had guided Glenys and the children straight to the farm on the previous day, they had tried one direction and then another and had finally sought shelter in an abandoned cottage.