Cissie huffed into the room just then. ‘They told me up at the house Kathy were havin’ the baby,’ she gasped breathlessly, noting how close John and Sunday appeared.

‘Babies!’ Sunday corrected her happily. ‘A boy and a girl, both doing well as is their mum.’

‘Well, I’ll be!’ Cissie plonked down onto the nearest chair with a broad smile on her face. ‘Ain’t that just the best news ever? May the dear lord bless their little souls!’

Chapter Nineteen

Kathy named her babies Thomas, for her late father, and Daisy, after her father’s sister, the aunt she had never known but who Sunday and Tom had told her so much about. In no time at all they had everyone who met them under their spell. They slept in their mother’s room in two tiny cots Sunday had fetched from the nursery at Treetops and were such good babies that the people in the lodge hardly knew they were there. They only cried when they were hungry and when that happened everyone always rushed to try to be the first to pick them up.

John Willerby was as besotted as everyone else and the day after they were born, he had an enormous bouquet of roses delivered for Kathy. Friends popped in to get a peep at the new arrivals and Kathy got frustrated because Sunday insisted she wasn’t to get up for at least a week.

‘But I’m bored lying here,’ she complained one morning as Sunday tidied the bed and tucked the covers about her.

‘Make the best of it, once those two get a bit older you’ll dream of being bored,’ Sunday told her with a grin, and so reluctantly Kathy did as she was told, although within hours of the birth she had felt as fit as a fiddle.

The twins were five days old when there was a tap on the front door and Sunday went to open it. She was surprised to see David Deacon standing on the doorstep clutching a colourful bunch of chrysanthemums and looking mildly embarrassed.

‘I, er … heard that Kathy had had the baby – or should I say babies? Are they all well?’

‘You’d better come in.’ Sunday held the door wide and allowed him to step past her. ‘And yes, they’re all very well, thank you,’ she said primly. She still had suspicions that David was the father and wasn’t quite sure how she should greet him.

David shuffled from foot to foot uncomfortably before saying, ‘I don’t suppose there’s much chance of me seeing Kathy is there?’