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is what you get.”
    “Best press on, then.”
    Mother made no answer. She did what Liza didn’t like her doing to her. It was a way she had of lifting her shoulders and dropping them again while looking hard into the other person’s eyes, but not smiling or showing anything. Until then Liza hadn’t seen Eve do it to anyone but herself.
    From an upstairs window, the one in Mother’s room in the gable which overlooked the lane this time, they watched the man go. It was only from here that you could see where the lane ran along past the wood on its way to the bridge in one direction, and in the other to peter out into first a track and then a footpath. The man walked slowly, as if his pack felt heavier with each step he took. At the point where the lane wound and narrowed he paused and looked back in the direction of Shrove or perhaps just at the high hills.
    They lost him among the trees, but they went on watching and after a little while saw him again, by now a small figure plodding along the footpath under the maple hedge. After that it became a game between the two of them, each claiming to be able to see him still. But when Liza got excited, Mother lifted her down from the window and they went downstairs to get on with Liza’s reading lesson. An hour every afternoon was spent on teaching her to read and an hour every morning teaching her writing. The lessons were soon to get much longer, with sums as well and drawing, but at the time the man with the beard came they lasted just two hours each day.
    Every morning very early, long before the writing lesson, they took the dogs out. Heidi and Rudi had been used to living indoors, so couldn’t have kennels outside, which Mother would have thought best, but slept in the little castle. Liza had never been in there before the dogs came, but Mother had a key and took her in with her and she saw a room shaped like her bedroom with six sides and narrow windows with arched tops, only these had no glass in them. The floor was of stone with straw on it and two old blankets and two old cushions for the dogs. Rudi and Heidi bounded about and nuzzled her and licked her face, making noises of relief and bliss at being released.
    Liza had thought how horrible it would be if they met the man with the beard while they were out in the water meadows. But they met no one, they hardly ever did, only a vixen going home with a rabbit in her mouth. Mother ordered the dogs to sit, to be still, and they obeyed her. She told Liza about foxes, how they lived and raised their young in earths, how people hunted them, and that this was wrong.
    That might have been the morning she saw her first kingfisher. It was about that time, she couldn’t be sure. Mother said kingfishers were not common and when you saw one you should phone up and tell the County Kingfisher Trust. So it must have been that morning, for after they got home and the dogs were back in the house next door, Mother locked her in her bedroom and went over to Shrove to phone.
    Liza read the words in the rag book and drew a picture of Mother on one of the sheets of paper. It might have been another day she did that, but she thought it was the Day of the Kingfisher. From about that time she got it into her head that all men had fair hair and all women dark. The man who delivered the oil was fair and so were the postman and Matt and the man with the beard, but Mother and she were dark. She drew a picture of Mother with her long dark hair down her back and her long colored skirt and her sandals.
    It was just finished when Mother unlocked the door and let her out. There was something different in the living room, Liza spotted it at once. It was hanging up on the wall over the fireplace, a long dark brown tube with a wooden handle. She had never seen anything like it before, but she knew Mother must have brought it back from Shrove.
    “It was a gun,” said Sean.
    “A shotgun. There were a lot of guns at Shrove. I began thinking about it