Miss Vereker did not die, but she very nearly did, and her parents had to be sent for at once to come from Cornwall; and there was a terrible fuss. There were people crying and shouting all over the house, and the children were packed off to stay with Aunt Maxine whom they disliked intensely.

This ended the regime of governesses. The boys were sent to a preparatory school and Sophia to a cheap but excellent day school where she was extremely miserable, because a spoilt, arrogant, lazy and precocious child naturally cannot be popular with, or even accepted by, ordinary and properly brought up little girls.

School set a barrier of shyness between the three young Gardens, formerly united in an unspoken but deep alliance. Yet mutual unhappiness and fear had forged the alliance so strongly that nothing could break it, and they had not been together for one day of the holidays before they rediscovered the fact that they were happier in each other’s society than in any other, except that of their mother.

When those four were together, they spun a delicious web of frail gaiety and laughter that neither memories of the past nor apprehensions for the future could spoil.

Sophia and her mother had the same lively fancy and both could tell stories; they could spin like two spiders by the hour, capping each other’s absurdities with wilder and wilder flights until the big bed in the attic, where the boys slept, shook with the weight of the four who sat curled on it and their helpless laughter.

How they laughed, stuffing pillows into their mouths to muffle the sound, an unfamiliar one in that house of slamming doors and sudden shouts of anger!

Harry’s fair face, so like his mother’s lovely dark one, was crimson with laughter, and all his curls would bob as he shook, and thin little Francis would sit silently rocking, with tears of laughter rolling down on either side of his big freckled nose, and Sophia, perched astride a pillow with her arms waving and her hair on end, would gabble on and on and on, only stopping to shriek with uncontrollable laughter at her own mad flights of invention.

Once Dr Garden came up unexpectedly and found them.

He opened the attic door very quietly, hoping to catch them before they knew he was there.

But before his hand was on the door, they heard his deliberate stealthy footsteps. The laughter stopped. He opened the door to see four quiet, stilled faces looking up at him. Mrs Garden drew Francis into her arms.

‘What’s the joke?’ asked Dr Garden, softly looming over them in his full height of six feet and two inches.

‘Nothing, Hartley … I was just sitting with the boys before they went to sleep. Did you want me? Were you calling?’

‘You seem to be enjoying yourselves,’ he said, still looking down at them.

‘Oh … nothing … only a silly story of Sophia’s.’

‘Sophia never tells me stories,’ he said, sneering. And he turned and lumbered downstairs.