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bumping down the rough farm track between Mr. Bowlem's flat fields to Tenpenny Road, past old Mrs. Button's cottage where, as a child, she had been given rice-cake and home-made lemonade, by Tenpenny Dyke where she still picked cowslips in summer, then a right turn into Chevisham Road and the straight two miles skirting Captain Massey's land and into Chevisham village. Every yard of it was familiar, reassuring, un menacing And even Hoggatt's Laboratory, blood or no blood, had been part of the village for over seventy years, while Chevisham Manor had stood for nearly three times as long. Arthur was right. Nothing frightening could happen to their Brenda at Hoggatt's.
    Mrs. Pridmore, comforted, drew back the curtains and settled down to enjoy her third cup of tea.
    At ten minutes to nine the post van stopped outside Sprogg's Cottage on the outskirts of Chevisham to deliver a single letter. It was addressed to Miss Stella Mawson, Lavender Cottage, Chevisham, but the postman was a local man and the difference in name caused him no confusion. There had been Sproggs living in the cottage for four generations, and the small triangle of green in front of the gate had been Sprogg's Green for almost as long. The present owner, having improved the cottage by the addition of a small brick garage and a modern bathroom and kitchen, had decided to celebrate the metamorphosis by planting a lavender hedge and renaming the property. But the villagers regarded the new name as no more than a foreigner's eccentric fancy which they were under no obligation either to use or recognize.
    The lavender hedge, as if in sympathy with their views, failed to survive the first fen winter and Sprogg's Cottage remained Sprogg's.
    Angela Foley, the twenty-seven-year-old personal secretary to the Director of Hoggatt's Laboratory, picked up the envelope and guessed at once by the quality of the paper, the expertly typed address and the London postmark what it must be. It was a letter they had been expecting. She took it through to the kitchen where she and her friend were breakfasting and handed it over without speaking, then watched Stella's face as she read. After a minute she asked:
    "Well?"
    "It's what we feared. He can't wait any longer. He wants a quick sale, and there's a friend of his who thinks he might like it for a weekend cottage. As sitting tenants we get first refusal, but he must know by next Monday whether we're interested."
    She tossed the letter across the table. Angela said bitterly:
    "Interested! Of course we're interested! He knows we are. We told him weeks ago that we were writing round trying to get a mortgage."
    "That's just lawyer's jargon. What his solicitor is asking is whether we're able to go ahead. And the answer is that we can't."
    The arithmetic was plain. Neither of them needed to discuss it. The owner wanted sixteen thousand pounds. None of the mortgage societies they had approached would advance them more than ten. Together they had a little over two thousand saved. Four thousand short. And, with no time left, it might just as well be forty.
    Angela said: "I suppose he wouldn't take less?"
    "No. We've tried that. And why should he? It's a fully converted, reed-thatched seventeenth century cottage. And we've improved it.
    We've made the garden. He'd be a fool to let it go for under sixteen even to a sitting tenant."
    "But, Star, we are sitting tenants! He's got to get us out first."
    "That's the only reason why he's given us as long as he has. He knows we could make it difficult for him. But I'm not prepared to stay on here under sufferance, knowing that we'd have to go in the end. I couldn't write under those conditions."
    "But we can't find four thousand in a week! And, with things as they are, we couldn't hope for a bank loan even if..."
    "Even if I had a book coming out this year, which I haven't. And what I make from writing barely pays my part of the housekeeping. It was tactful of you not to say so."
    She hadn't been going