Jimmy grinned too. Because Miss Trent was teaching all day and Mo stayed with her, it had fallen mostly to him to ask questions. Folk were polite, but now that Wynne had mentioned it, he realised that everyone had been quick to deny any knowledge of a Grace Griffiths who had been unwise enough to marry an Englishman and lose touch with her roots. So now he looked rather helplessly at his friend. ‘Are you tellin’ me that people have told me untruths?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Oh lor’, don’t say all that trampin’ from farmhouse to farmhouse has been for nothin’!’

Wynne shook his head. ‘It’s all right, I were havin’ you on,’ he assured Jimmy. ‘The Welsh are proud of their family connections, and they’d certainly never lie to you. But remember, it’s more than twelve years since your mother went off to Liverpool to marry without her family’s approval. I dare say it was the talk of the town at the time, but people forget. Now, want to have first go on the sledge?’

When Miss Trent opened the door to Jimmy well after ten o’clock that evening, she tutted over his soaking raiment and sat him in front of a far better fire than Mrs Hughes would have allowed had she been awake. But the landlady always went early to bed, complaining that she had to be up betimes in the mornings; Mo, on the other hand, who could never now be persuaded to go to bed until she knew her brother was home safe, raised heavy eyes when he came in and asked him rather sleepily whether he had had fun.

‘Yes, I had a grand time. But when we first got up there I had quite a scare – well, an adventure you could call it. I was looking back at our footprints, and . . .’

He began to tell the story of his fear that Cyril had caught up with them and his subsequent relief when he identified the stranger as a farm worker, but halfway through he noticed his little sister’s apprehension and hastily brought his narrative to a close. ‘Tell you what, Mo, if the frost holds I’ll take you with me when we go sledgin’ next,’ he said. ‘But you’d best go to bed now; you look wore out.’

Glenys shook her head. ‘Wait a bit, Mo my love,’ she said quickly. ‘What Jimmy has just told us is, in a way, what I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. Jimmy, what would you have done if the man following you really had been Cyril, or one of his cronies?’

Jimmy frowned. ‘But it wasn’t. I thought I made that plain enough.’

Glenys sighed. ‘Don’t you understand? Listen, Jimmy! What would you have done if the man following you had been Cyril Huxtable?’

Jimmy began to say that it was just his foolishness which had made him assume the man was after him, but Mo slid off Glenys’s knee and went and gave her brother a poke. ‘You’re stupid you are,’ she said scornfully. ‘Auntie Glenys is asking what you would have done if the man following you hadn’t been a farm hand. Would you have burrowed into the snow, like an ostrich?’ She giggled. ‘Hiding all of you except your bum? Or would you have run further into the hills, or headed here? I suppose you could have done that, only then you might be leading Cyril straight to me and Glenys. Go on, answer the question!’