"You and your dark strangers!" David laughed. "What a mass of superstition you are. Don't have any dealings with a dark stranger, that's my advice to you."

He strolled out of the house laughing, but when he was away from the house, his face clouded over and he frowned to himself murmuring:

"Bad luck to you, Lynn. Coming home from abroad and upsetting the apple cart."

For he realised that at this very moment he was deliberately making a course on which he might hope to meet the girl he had just apostrophised so savagely.

Rosaleen watched him stroll away across the garden and out through the small gate that gave on to a public footpath across the fields. Then she went up to her bedroom and looked through the clothes in her wardrobe. She always enjoyed touching and feeling her new mink coat. To think she should own a coat like that - she could never quite get over the wonder of it. She was in her bedroom when the parlourmaid came up to tell her that Mrs Marchmont had called.

Adela was sitting in the drawing-room with her lips set tightly together and her heart beating at twice its usual speed. She had been steeling herself for several days to make an appeal to Rosaleen but true to her nature had procrastinated.

She had also been bewildered by finding that Lynn's attitude had unaccountably changed and that she was now rigidly opposed to her mother seeking relief from her anxieties by asking Gordon's widow for a loan.

However another letter from the Bank Manager that morning had driven Mrs Marchmont into positive action. She could delay no longer. Lynn had gone out early, and Mrs Marchmont had caught sight of David Hunter walking along the footpath - so the coast was clear. She particularly wanted to get Rosaleen alone, without David, rightly judging that Rosaleen alone would be a far easier proposition.

Nevertheless she felt dreadfully nervous as she waited in the sunny drawing-room, though she felt slightly better when Rosaleen came in with what Mrs Marchmont always thought of as her "half-witted look" more than usually marked.

"I wonder," thought Adela to herself, "if the blast did it or if she was always like that?"

Rosaleen stammered.

"Oh, g-g-ood morning. Is there anything? Do sit down."

"Such a lovely morning," said Mrs Marchmont brightly. "All my early tulips are out. Are yours?"

The girl stared at her vacantly.

"I don't know."

What was one to do, thought Adela, with someone who didn't talk gardening or dogs - those standbyes of rural conversation.

Aloud she said, unable to help the tinge of acidity that crept into her tone:

"Of course you have so many gardeners - they attend to all that."

"I believe we're shorthanded. Old Mullard wants two more men, he says. But there seems a terrible shortage still of labour."

The words came out with a kind of glib parrot-like delivery - rather like a child who repeats what it has heard a grownup person say.