“Take that damn cushion away. How often am I to tell you that I’ll rest if I must, but I won’t be poodled about. Talkin’ of dogs, where’s Hoover? You better go and have a look, Barbara; if that blasted dog is diggin’ up my seeds I’ll have the hide off him.”

Iris, dressed in a striped linen overall, came bounding out of the house. The colonel held out a hand. “Hullo, twopence!”

Iris hugged him.

“How’s your poor ulcer?”

“Tiresome; you don’t know how much milk I’m made to drink. Shockin’ stuff!”

Iris leant affectionately against him.

“When you’ve had your rest would you like me to help you move the flags on your maps? Last time we did that you drank a whole glass and never noticed.”

Barbara touched Janet. She spoke in a whisper.

“Come and help me find Hoover. Those two will be perfectly happy together.”

Almost the entire garden, and it was far larger than it looked, was given up to vegetables. Barbara led the way and talked to Janet over her shoulder.

“Daddy simply adores Iris, he thinks she’s so intelligent.”

“So she is. What was her mother like, not in face, I mean, but as a person?”

“Oh, she was lovely! She had been a dancer . . .”

“A dancer! Then that explains Iris. She danced when I put her frock on this afternoon, and I thought she put more to it than you’d expect from an ordinary child.”

“Anna, that was her mother’s name, was more than a dancer, she had trained for the ballet since she was a child, and she danced for some seasons with the Russians, and had travelled everywhere, but what she wanted to do was design, scenery and everything.”

“Fancy her marrying a farmer!”

Barbara stopped to examine some tomato plants. “Donald met her in London and they fell in love with each other. I don’t think she ever thought about how it would be living on a farm. You wouldn’t, if you were in love, would you?”

“No, I suppose not, but it must have been difficult to throw everything up like that.”

“You’ve never been in love,” said Barbara decidedly. “If you’re in love you don’t care where you live, or what you have to live on, it’s just being with the one person that matters . . .” She broke off, conscious she was showing more of herself than she intended. “At least, that’s what I should think.”

“I’ve never been in love,” Janet admitted, “so I wouldn’t know. And she was quite happy on her farm?”

Barbara was a little reluctant to continue her story.

“To begin with she was, but at the end she missed things awfully, I think. It was partly her illness, perhaps, it was tuberculosis; it seems to make you awfully gay and alive in between bring very ill.”