“It’s only a workman’s cottage, and awfully out of the way.” Janet’s thoughts shot back to battered London.

“Awfully out of the way,” she repeated softly. “I should have thought people would pay a lot for that.”

The cottage lay across a field in which cattle were grazing. It was whitewashed, and as Janet drew nearer she could see it was beautifully thatched. The fence of the field and its gate were the entrance to a little garden, the garden of a Londoner’s dream. A flagged path bordered with lavender hedges, flower-beds behind blue with delphiniums and silver with lilies, a honeysuckle over the porch and roses everywhere.

“Goodness!” gasped Janet. “Fancy us in a lovely place like that.” Then she gave a cry, for a figure came out of the porch and waved. “Mum!”

Sheila looked at the suitcase standing forgotten in the field.

“I suppose she expects me to carry it, but I won’t, and I only hope the cows kick it.”

Janet, tearing through the gate and up the path, was too excited to see her mother clearly. It was only when her first hugs were over that she was conscious of how little there was of the frame in her arms. She drew away and looked up, and fright laid clammy fingers on her heart. This was not even the mother that she and the doctor had beguiled away from the bombing; that woman had been frail, but this one was sick.

Maggie Brain never thought of herself except as a mother. Long ago, when Sheila was a baby, she had thought of herself as a wife. She had been so happy then, so loved, and so understood, that when her husband died it had seemed as if something of her died with him. She pulled herself away from her grief for the sake of her babies, but she was never again the laughing, soft Maggie her husband had known; she never again thought of herself as a person to be cherished and loved, but gave herself body, mind and spirit to her children.

Maggie’s eyes searched her daughter’s face for signs of the strain she had been through, for tiredness, for thinness, for lack of sleep. She was puzzled by Janet’s expression.

“What’s the matter, child? You’re staring at me as if I were a ghost.”