Everyone crowded round the front door to watch. Gina, in her mac and sou’wester, ran out and took the umbrella, while Mr Stellion opened the door and very carefully helped his housekeeper into the front passenger seat. Then, while he went round to get in the car on his side, Gina folded the umbrella and stood it in the footwell where it dripped on Mrs Thwaite’s feet, then closed the car door firmly.

As the car pulled away, Gina gave Mrs Thwaite a big smile and waved her off.

The clean-up took a while but eventually a row of galvanised buckets was placed under the leaking seam in the glass roof, the water was swept outside and the handyman from Great Grindle arrived and assessed the repair needed.

‘Good work, girls,’ Tom said to Dora and his nieces. ‘We’ll need to keep emptying these buckets, but I think the rain is easing off now. I’m right proud of you all.’

‘Aye, it takes an Arnold to resolve a crisis,’ said Gina cheekily.

Or to make one! She was by now desperate to have some time alone to think through what had happened. The spell she’d cast the previous day had read confusingly in the old book, and she wasn’t sure she’d understood what she had to do, or if the elements she’d gathered to cast it were even the right ones, but she had known what she wanted to achieve. The book of spells had instructed Gina to write down on a small piece of paper what she wished for and she’d written down that she wanted Mrs Thwaite taught a lesson for her rudeness. Now it seemed her powers had not failed her. And how! A deluge, no less, had dealt the necessary blow to the interfering housekeeper. Mrs Thwaite would not be troubling Gina for a while if her arm really was broken. It was a lot to take in. Could she really have conjured up this vast amount of rain – with all its consequences – just from the spell she’d cast in her bedroom?

Tom and Ellen left through the conservatory when the drama was over, and Dora and Gina came back along the corridor.

‘Well, that’s put me behind,’ said Dora. ‘Let’s just see if Mrs Bassett can find us a sandwich while we dry off. It’s hardly worth you going home in this rain, just to come back in an hour or so to walk Coco.’