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    “They might have been. But not any more. Take things easy, Agatha. Relax. If you behave in a quiet, friendly way to him, he’ll come around.”
    “I’ve decided I’m not interested any more. I mean, if he fancied someone like Mary Fortune, I don’t think I want to know.”
    Bill shook his head. “You don’t know much about him. There’s your doorbell again.”
    Agatha ran to the door. Perhaps he had come back. But it was the men with the greenhouse.
    Bill took his leave with promises to return and left Agatha with the workmen.
    By the end of that day a small new greenhouse glittered at the end of Agatha’s garden. She restrained an impulse to rush next door to ask James to come with her to a nursery the following day. He might just remind her that Mary wanted to come along as well.
    So instead she went to the Red Lion. It was one of these odd evenings when the pub was thin of company. She talked to a few of the locals, her eyes always straying to the door, waiting for the tall figure of James Lacey to appear.
    She made her way home finally, slightly tipsy, and went disconsolately to bed.

    The following day she felt bloated, old and downright plain. She sadly took herself off to a local nursery to ask their advice and returned home with packets of seeds, seed trays and instructions which she had written down. She worked busily, planting trays of chrysanthemum, Coltness Mixture and Rigoletto. Then she planted trays of Arctotis hybrida , or African daisy. By evening she had finished her work with trays of hibiscus, a variety called Disco Belle. The hibiscus and the chrysanthemums were supposed to be sown in February and planted out in May, but she had been told to sow the African daisies in March. But, thought Agatha, the work was so soothing and it was nearly the end of February anyway. All of them would then be planted out in May.
    Next door, James could see Agatha bent over her work in the greenhouse. He felt disappointed that she had not asked for his help.

Three
    A s a reluctant spring crept over the Cotswolds, Agatha’s mind often turned to Wilson’s offer of a job. At last he phoned her himself and she told him that she might be ready to start work in the autumn, because by the autumn the gardening days would be over. Mary had become a friend, despite Agatha’s initial reluctance. She was always claiming, always ready to help, and her close relationship with James Lacey appeared to be at an end.
    Daffodils shone in the gardens of the village, and then came the cascades of wisteria and heavy lilac blossoms. It was such a miserable spring that it seemed incredible that anything could blossom at all in the slashing rain and gusts of chilly wind. Agatha intended to plant out her seedlings on the first of May. She had bought more trays of seedlings from the nursery and they lay alongside the ‘home-grown’ products in her greenhouse waiting for the big day.
    She had promised Mrs Bloxby to help at the tombola stand on May Monday, which was when all the village celebrations were to take place. Sunday was to be May the first.
    It was on Friday the twenty-ninth of April, that James decided he had been too hard on Agatha. She had in the past made him countless cups of coffee and brought him cakes. They had shared many adventures together. It nagged at his mind that he had taken Mary Fortune out for several dinners while Agatha had been away, and yet he had never asked Agatha out. He had at one time, he admitted, thought that Agatha was keen on him and he had shied away from the thought. But the woman had been all that was normal. In fact, she had never called on him.
    So on Friday morning he went and rang her doorbell and asked a flustered Agatha – flustered because she was still in her dressing-gown – out to dinner at a new restaurant in Moreton, the Game Bird.
    Gardening forgotten for once, Agatha passed the day in a daze of preparation, finding to her delight that gardening, along with a moderate