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slaughtered during the Reformation by a faction group of Gower wreckers dead drunk on contraband brandy. The Applebys were smugglers and wreckers themselves at one time but later they became respectable and produced several vicars of Penhale; that meant they still smuggled, but they gave up wrecking. Probably, as my mother would have said, they felt they had to draw the line somewhere.
    “I just don’t understand,” I said to Ginette. “How could you possibly have behaved in such an appalling fashion?”
    She began to cry. I was aghast. I was not unaccustomed to seeing her in tears for she had always cherished the tiresome belief that weeping was a necessary adjunct of a heroine’s passionate nature, but these tears were far removed from her usual histrionic displays of emotion. They filled her eyes and trickled down her cheeks in silence, and as I watched she bowed her head in despair.
    “Ah Ginette, Ginette …” I did not know what to do. We never embraced. I was being educated in a culture that judged it very sloppy for a boy to make a spontaneous gesture of affection. In the end I merely sat down beside her on the window seat and suggested the only possible panacea. “Come home to Oxmoon.”
    “I can’t. There was a dreadful quarrel. Didn’t they tell you?”
    “But they’ve forgiven you!”
    “I haven’t forgiven them. They were horrid about Conor, they said he wasn’t what he seemed to be but that was the whole point: he was. He was real. But nothing else was. I’d been living in a fairy tale.” She blew her nose on a grubby handkerchief before adding unsteadily, “I don’t want to live in a fairy tale anymore.”
    “You’re living in a fairy tale if you believe that villain will ever come back for you!”
    “No. I’m going to marry him.”
    “But you can’t! What about me? You can’t just throw me over as if I no longer exist!”
    She gazed at me helplessly. “I’m sorry, it’s as if we don’t even talk the same language anymore.”
    “But you swore I came first with you!”
    “And so you did,” she said. “You were there in the beginning, you were part of the magic of Oxmoon, and you’ll be with me always in my memory, always to the very end of my life.” She broke down again. I tried to grab her hand, as if I could lead her back to the strawberry beds, symbol of our paradise lost, but she jumped up and ran sobbing from the room.
    I was alone.
    VII
    SHE DID GO BACK to Oxmoon but only for an occasional visit with Lady Appleby and the Applebys’ son, Timothy, who had recently come down from Cambridge. The presence of Timothy annoyed me for I thought him a poor fish, and I became even more annoyed when Ginette, who had once described him as the lamppost the lamplighter forgot, never failed to giggle at his idiotic jokes.
    “You don’t care for Timothy, do you?” I said to her once on a rare occasion when we were alone together.
    “Good heavens, no!” she said. “But he’s very amusing, and it’s nice to have an older friend who’s been out and about in the world.”
    In the autumn she was sent to Germany to spend six months at a finishing school, but she had barely arrived home from Germany in the March of 1898 when she and Timothy announced their engagement. I was at Harrow but my father wrote, my mother wrote and this time even Ginette herself wrote to break the news. Her letter arrived first.
    Darling Robert, she began. Advancing years had taught her how to be effusive, and I knew very well that the more nervous she was the more effusive she became. Something simply too divine has happened and I’m engaged to be married!!! To Timothy!!! I’m so excited I can hardly put pen to paper but of course I had to tell you at once because after all you’re so special to me and always will be, quite the best first-cousin-once-removed that anyone ever had, and I’m sure that when you marry I shall be madly jealous and gnash my teeth and long to be an absolute CAT to her!
    Now