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walked down it, for an instant she was overcome with panic. She wanted to run, to hide, to find a dark, secret place to curl up and cry as she had, long ago, under the bedclothes, when she first came to England and knew that never again was she going to be kissed goodnight.
    But she had been only ten then. Now she was twenty-two. Too old to cry. Too old to show her feelings.
    By the time James Gardiner came round the corner from the Gallery, she was moving slowly to meet him, her emotions under control.
    'Dr Dyer has lost his gloves—ah, you've got them. Good.'
    As he took them from her, he scarcely glanced at her face.
    She watched him striding away, his broad upper back tapering to a lean waist and hips, his well-brushed glossy dark hair just touching the back of his shirt collar.
    In that moment her usually pliant and amiable nature was swept by violent emotions quite foreign to her normal temperament. She felt anger, and fierce hostility and, above all, a burning desire to retaliate.
    How, she had no idea. The desire, though strong, was vague, expressing itself in the thought: I'll show you. You wait, Mr Gardiner. I'll show you... damn you!

    It was dark when she cycled back to the cottage near the village school of which, at one time, Miss Ewing had been in charge.
    Summer put her bike in the shed at the end of the garden. The back yard she had called it at first, before Aunt Margaret had corrected her.
    The door at the rear of the cottage led directly into the kitchen-cum-breakfast-room. There was no dining room and only a very small sitting room. ( 'Not living room, Summer. In England we say sitting room or, in a larger house, drawing room.') But as they never entertained, the lack of space hadn't mattered.
    In all the years she had lived there, until Miss Ewing's first stroke, they had never had anyone to supper, or even to coffee and biscuits. To a child whose parents had delighted in impromptu parties for the friends made everywhere they went, Miss Ewing's belief in keeping herself to herself had been incomprehensible.
    Since her aunt's death, Summer had made some improvements to the warmth and comfort of the cottage. The practical side of her nature, repressed by her aunt's insistence that she concentrate on her studies, had finally found expression in hanging more suitable wallpaper—small spriggy designs by Laura Ashley—over the ugly patterns chosen by Miss Ewing.
    She hadn't enough money to make all the changes she would have liked, but gradually it was becoming a more welcoming place to come back to and spend her solitary evenings.
    The absence of a television was no hardship to her, but lately she had been thinking it would be nice to have a cat. Until Emily's grandfather had died, she had seen herself staying at the cottage for at least the next three or four years. Marriage, or living with someone, had not been in her mind for a long time—not since that last blind date organised by well-meaning girl-friends.
    Sometimes at night, before sleeping, she would let her imagination conjure romantic fantasies in which, slim and beautiful, she played the part of the mysterious Barbara dei Trechi whose love affair with the Chevalier Bayard resulted in the birth of his only known child, a daughter; or of Mary Wilemson, the Dutch girl whom Lion Gardiner had married while he was serving in the army of the Prince of Orange and whom, a year later, he took to Massachusetts with him.
    Some of her father's forbears had come from Holland, and perhaps that was why, of the two passionate day-dreams she had so often replayed in her mind at night, she had always identified best with Mary, the pioneer bride unafraid of the dangers and hardships as long as she had Lion to protect her.
    Now James Gardiner's coming had made it impossible for her ever again to think of Lion Gardiner without seeing, in her mind's eye, the compelling dark face of the man who had adopted his surname in preference to his own patronymic. And with the