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neither ventured beyond it. They belonged to the old woman’s secret, flower-filled world, and they were held within it as if by a spell. Once again, Catriona was reminded of a half-forgotten fairy-tale, and she wondered if the whole island were enchanted.
    Leaning farther out, she turned her head to the right and saw that the narrow side street sloped steeply downwards. At the far end, she glimpsed the slender campanile of a church, and beyond the campanile a pencil-like shaft of blue betrayed the nearness of the sea. It didn’t look as if it could be more than half a mile away, and she remembered what Toni had said: Valletta was built on a peninsula.
    More than anything she wanted to explore, to slip into a pair of old jeans and go for a walk, but that wasn’t possible. When she looked at her watch she saw that it was now well past seven o’clock. She had to freshen up and change for dinner, and before doing that she needed to unpack.
    Catriona’s scanty wardrobe had not been improved by incarceration in a tightly packed suitcase. As she began putting things away in the vast hanging cupboard provided for the purpose, she realised, with a shock, that she had hardly anything suitable to wear. In England clothes had not presented any particular problem, and since she had recently purchased one or two summery items, she had imagined, when she packed that morning, that she was fairly well equipped for Malta. Now, for the very first time in her life, she felt almost ashamed of her own skimpy belongings. She only had a couple of crumpled cotton dresses, three pairs of jeans and a small selection of severely practical shirts and tops. None of it seemed exactly suitable for life in an aristocratic Maltese household. She didn’t buy expensive clothes — she had never been able to afford them—and she didn’t even own a pair of evening shoes. At least half her luggage was composed of painting equipment and as she looked at it, piled up in a corner of the room, she felt, just for a moment, faintly desperate.
    Then she took a firm grip of herself. She was a struggling artist, not a member of the jet set. At the moment, she didn’t spend money on clothes because she had priorities that were more important, and that wasn’t going to change. Not just because she had entered the employment of Peter Vilhena, anyway. In the morning she might go out and buy another dress—perhaps a skirt too, and a top to go with it. But that would be her limit. She wasn’t trying to compete with Antoinette.
    Inspecting the blue, sleeveless dress that was her only possible choice for evening, she told herself firmly that there was nothing wrong with it. It was rather plain, but it had cost quite a lot more than anything else she possessed and it suited her. It had suffered badly in transit, and she wished that she had an iron, or at least that she had the courage to ring the bell and ask for one. The bell was beside her bed, and for a moment she almost pressed it, but then her nerve failed her. In her own way the maid was as well turned out as Toni. What on earth would she be likely to think of a girl who arrived from England with practically nothing to wear?
    In the end, she resorted to the simple expedient of hanging the dress beside a window, and by the time she had taken a shower in the tiny bathroom adjoining her room it was beginning to recover fairly well. She brushed her hair and applied a little make-up, at the same time studying her reflection critically. In England the summer had been wet, and she hadn’t acquired any tan at all, but now she noticed that on the way from the airport her nose had come into contact with too much sunshine and the fair, sensitive skin had reacted angrily. It was red and sore, but there was almost nothing she could do about it. Desperately she wondered if there might be some way she could camouflage the damage. It looked so dreadful. Then she suddenly caught herself up.
    Did a thing like that really matter?