Originally she had been disappointed that Joyce could not stay on with her at Glendrochatt, but she was now conscious of a secret relief that she would no longer feel compelled to try to include Joyce in her unexpected new friendship with the Colonel. In fact, breezy Joyce never had the slightest difficulty making friends of either sex and led a very sociable life, but with Morwenna it was far otherwise. Never having received the slightest encouragement from her family to have much opinion of her own charms, Morwenna had been enchanted in her late twenties to find love. A supremely happy marriage had followed – that happiness only to be snatched away when her charming, gentle clergyman husband had been found lying face down among the old grey gravestones in the churchyard of his country parish, dead of a heart attack aged forty.

Though they had still not given up praying for a baby at the time of his death, they had failed to achieve this longed-for blessing, so the desolate trudge through widowhood was especially bleak. Without the incentive to keep going for the sake of the children or the opportunities for making friends that a young family can provide, it was hard to make the efforts required to get going again alone, but Morwenna had got on with her life with a stolid lack of fuss or self-pity that people often mistook for self-sufficiency. Her green fingers had come to her rescue and she had turned for support to the one thing at which she thought she was any good. Urgently needing to earn some money, she had become a jobbing gardener working for more affluent neighbours, a business that had flourished way beyond her expectations, so that her advice started to be sought by local garden enthusiasts and her various employers turned into clients. From this small beginning had also sprung the gardening column that was responsible for her current attempt to improve her writing skills.