All the windows rattled and let in draughts, and sometimes when they were pushed up in a certain way a sound like a note on a distant and mysterious gong came from inside the place where the sashline was; Sophia was always hoping to hear this.

The side of the cottage overlooking somebody’s backyard was made of brown weatherboarding with a tiny window set in it, and there was a roof of purple slates crowned at one end by a huge, brick chimney, looking much too big for the little house to support.

The Cottage did not look aggressively romantic, nor picturesque. It was about a hundred and forty years old, and as it was joined on to the back of one of the big houses where Leigh Hunt was supposed to have lived, it is possible that a workman or perhaps a groom attached to the big house may have lived there. Mrs Carmody, who also owned the alleged Leigh Hunt house, had filched a bit of its larder to make a bathroom for the cottage (you could see that it had been the angle of a passage; it was a very odd shape indeed), but really no one knew much about the Cottage.

It was called The Cottage, The Vale, Enbury Heath. An odd, self-contained, lovable little house, thought Sophia, who was one of the people who fall in love with places as well as with persons, and rather more easily; just big enough for the boys and me, and looking over gardens running sideways on to the Heath, full of bare fruit trees, and the golden lettering of ‘Meuxwell’s Ale’ on the side of the Vale Arms, at the end of the slummy alley. An independent, sturdy-looking little house, thought Sophia, and at Easter we shall be able to see the Fair Ground from the bedroom windows … if we get it, that is!

This sobering thought reminded her of the sale; she sighed, and wondered how it was going and who had bought little Nydia? It was nearly four o’clock; the low, bright winter sunlight had left the Vale in shadow half an hour ago, and was lingering on the high ridge of the Don’s Mile, which overhung the Vale and stole much of its light in the late afternoon. The golden letters on the Vale Arms glittered against the pale blue sky, the low roar of motorcycles rushing along the Don’s Mile came peacefully to Sophia as she sat on the inviting step of the Cottage, with her beret for a cushion, and dreamed.

Presently she thought she would go up to the pond on the edge of Wrenwood, an estate which had recently been added to Enbury Heath, and try to see a water rat. They came out when it was getting dark, and once she had played peep-bo with one there, the rat looking round a tree root every three minutes or so to see if she had gone away yet, and Sophia, delighted and silent, staring at him with all her eyes and refusing to go.