He looked at Rosie who was listening attentively to the lesson to pass on to the others back at the farm while holding Simon Peter’s hand and making funny faces to amuse him. Rosie would make a good mother and Clem believed wholeheartedly that Matthias would make the ideal husband and father for her babies. Renfree was unmarried at the age of thirty and would have the stewardship of Ker-an-Mor, the Pengarron home farm, after his father. Rosie was born to be a farmer’s wife and with Matthias she would be the wife of someone with position. She was committed to the Methodist ideals and would be a comfort and support to Matthias. But it was an uphill struggle to manoeuvre the two together. Neither of them showed the least interest in the other. Rosie was a pretty girl with a clear complexion and large blue eyes in a round face, but she stayed solidly with the family at all times. Matthias always dressed as if he was at a funeral, not the sort of figure to turn a girl’s eye. No one else would approve but Clem decided to buy a love potion when next at Marazion’s market. Perhaps that would get things moving.

Clem noticed his weren’t the only eyes that had wandered around the room and stopped at Rosie. A young gangly miner was staring at her with a lovesick look on his pimply face. Clem glared at him; he would have a word with that individual later, nip his interest in the bud. No coarse-mouthed miner was going to snare his sister, and no amount of Bible class attendances was going to make him suitable for her.

When the miner noticed Clem’s disapproving stare, he looked away nervously and red-faced. He had witnessed Clem seeing off other young men, including Paul King, who had wanted to court Rosie. Obviously Clem thought no one but a farmer was good enough for her.

Content in her maidenly life and oblivious of the hopes that the two men in the cottage had of altering the situation, Rosie went on happily amusing Simon Peter Blake.

Clem fell back into his private world of self-tortured thoughts of his stolen love, unaware of the shouts and growing commotion outside until the people in the cottage were drawn to their feet. Someone flung the door open and let in the evening sunlight. The sound of a bell’s foreboding peel reached his ears. The shouts outside and the stricken faces within spelled out what was happening. People poured out of the meeting and joined the rush to a disaster half a mile away at the mine.

Clem felt an urgent tug on his arm. Jack, the groom from the stables of Pengarron Manor, whispered to him, ‘What’s happened, Clem?’

‘Rock fall,’ Clem answered grimly.