Stranger's Trespass

STRANGER'S TRESPASS Jane Arbor

Loraine had always been deeply interested in, and worked hard for, the family glass business, Lairge Chrystal, and it was a shock when, on her stepfather's death, she learned that it had been left, not to her, but to an unknown nephew, Ross Frere. Ross promptly took over, as he was perfectly within his rights to do, but his arrival was deeply resented by Loraine, as were his ruthless 'new broom' methods. In time, however, in justice she had to admit that most of his ideas were good ones, and she came to respect him - indeed, to feel rather moore deeply for him than just respect. But she also discovered that she was not the only woman who was interested in Ross - and what chance did she have against the glamorous, worldly Cleone Lord?

CHAPTER ONE 'WELL, you've taken your time about coming, haven't you?' As soon as they were out Loraine heard the studied offence of the words. But she had savoured the chance to say them for too long to care overmuch for their effect on the stranger who sat across from her, his back to the tall window which gave on to the rainswept quay and the grey swell of the river beyond. 'You mean—' He paused, made her wait while he set aside his empty coffee-cup and recrossed a leg - 'you think I should have tried to be here for your stepfather's funeral?' Her shoulder lifted in a tiny shrug. 'It's not for me to say "should have", though I'd have expected you would want to be,' she told him. 'But I wrote that I was in America for my firm and couldn't make it. After all, he was only my uncle by marriage. I'd never met him and at the time I saw no reason—' 'Since, then?' Loraine cut in. That was nearly three months ago and you'd have heard straight away that he had left you Lairge Crystal and this house - the lot!' 'Of course. Out of the blue. But three months for the winding-up of an estate is nothing. It could well have taken longer still if his solicitors hadn't been an English firm, which helped to speed things up.' 'Well, naturally they'd be English. He was - as he never let one forget. Nor how he despised us. "The Irish? A lot of slaphappy layabouts, if you ask me",' quoted Loraine, and watched distaste for the tartness cross her companion's face.

Ross Frere regarded her for a long moment's silence. Then 'You know, I've always thought that Latin bit about "Nothing - unless good - of the dead" had something to it,' he commented quietly. Loraine bit her lip. 'I'm sorry. Forget it, please,' she said, her tone rough. 'After all, he married your mother, and she was Irish. But I take it you didn't like him?' 'No. I—' She thrust an ugly memory behind her and went on, 'Anyway, now you are here, I suppose you want to take over? For instance - the house? Are you going to live in it?' 'I'd thought of doing so.' 'Then you'll want me to get out as soon as possible?' 'Well—' his slight smile invited hers - 'as we could only share it with propriety in certain circumstances, I'm afraid, yes. But I needn't hurry you. You've been living alone in it since my uncle died?' 'Except for Morag, who showed you in.' 'She's your housekeeper? Do you think she would be prepared to stay on and look after me?' Not without a faint satisfaction Loraine said, 'I doubt it. I should think she would rather retire. She came straight from school into service with my mother. She was here before I was born and she's getting on now.' 'Well, we'll see.' He paused before adding, 'You know, although you could say we're even distantly related, we've been flung into each other's laps without either knowing much about the other. Gould we recap a bit, do you think? Clear our decks? For instance, to me you're

still the "L. Starr" of a business letter or two - do you realize that? What is your Christian name?' 'It's Loraine.' 'Mine is Ross, though you'll know that. I sign my letters in full. Loraine?' He nodded. 'Rather nice.' (Ross. Red. How had anyone known at his birth that he was going to grow that thatch of russet hair, that square leonine face?) Aloud she said, 'I had to be Loraine. There's always been one in the family.' 'With one 'r' or two?' 'One.' 'I see. Feminine licence. But still deriving, I suppose, from the original Lorrainers who came over from France?' Loraine stared. 'Yes. But how. did you know?' Ross Frere laughed. 'My dear girl, the legends get around. I do happen to be in the glass industry myself - remember?' 'Of course, but - well, sheet stuff. Window panes, bottles, that sort of thing. You make glass like - like soup or blancmange!' she disparaged. He laughed again, though shortly. 'Whereas you lead- crystal types blow it molten and fashion it by hand and engrave it with love and consider yourselves the elect by reason of that? All right, so you've got a craft where we've got an industry. But we both owe our beginnings to the Phoenicians, they say, and I do happen to have heard that your ancestors were the gentlemen glassmakers of Lorraine who fled from religious persecution in the seventeenth century and settled in the English Midlands where there was coal for

their ovens. Also that your branch broke off later and set up here in Lairge. That was several generations ago on your mother's side, wasn't it?' Loraine nodded. 'Yes. She inherited from her father. My father came in at the bottom on one of the "chairs" and when he was made a junior partner he married Mother. I only just remember him. When I was twelve she married again - Simon Clay, your uncle - and when she died she left Lairge Crystal solely to him.' 'And he to me - whom he knew only by name. Odd. Why not back to you or in trust for you? You may have expected that?' Loraine said hardly, 'I'd given up expecting anything from him.' 'Not even something you could well have regarded as your right? How long had he been in sole control?' 'Five years too long.' Ross Frere's tawny eyes narrowed on her. 'Is that prejudice or borne out by fact?' 'You must judge for yourself. I can only point to blank, export orderbooks and idiotic changes of policy, and count the craftsmen we've lost to England for want of enough work for them here.' 'So far downhill - all in five years?' 'Longer than that. Your uncle had virtually taken over for some time before Mother died. He hadn't a clue and didn't care who knew it.' 'I see. But under someone "with a clue", couldn't the position be retrieved?' 'Of course - in time. I could - I mean could have - retrieved it if—'

Ross Frere pounced. 'Then you did hope to inherit? And you are implying that I'm not a fit substitute?' 'I didn't say so. But you're new to crystal and you ought to know that it's a craft that takes a lifetime.' 'Well, at thirty-five I hope I've got quite a slice of lifetime before me,' he returned mildly. 'And come to that, your own experience can't be all that lengthy. Say four years at most since you left school?' Loraine snapped, 'Five. I'm twenty-two. But I was born to it. I didn't grow up with a glass house literally at the back door without poking my nose into everything that went on there and learning a lot.' 'I suppose not. And what's your function now?' 'Oh, general dogsbody. Nominally I'm a secretary, but that's cover for a lot. I get round all the shops at least once every day. People get upset; gear goes on the blink and I'm - that is, I have been, a sort of appeal-court for problems.' 'A personnel officer and shop-steward rolled into one? Well, are you prepared to go on being a "secretary"?' Ross made a quotation of the word. 'You mean - under you?' Loraine met his eyes stonily. 'I don't know. It depends.' 'I see. I'm to do my probation. All right, but can I look to you to carry on until I take over?' 'Why not? I've been doing just that for the last three months, haven't I?' Feeling as ungracious as that sounded, Loraine rose. 'Shall I show you round now? The morning shift goes off at noon.'

Ross looked at his watch. 'Please.' But as he stood she saw him notice a framed photograph at his elbow and he paused. 'Your mother?' he asked. 'Yes.' He glanced from the photograph to study her thin olive-skinned face framed in the gleaming helmet of black hair curving in at jaw level; the dark shadowed eyes which had no smile in them. 'You're like her,' he commented. 'No. She had deep blue eyes and her hair was auburn. She was beautiful.' 'The colouring doesn't show, and you look to me to have the same fine bones.' The appraisal was as cool and analytic as if he had her under a microscope.

A month later the brown house on the quay was virtually empty of all that had made it 'home' to Loraine; the bigger furniture sold; the few small pieces she was keeping already removed to the flat she would be sharing on the country fringe of the city with her friend Shelagh Maille, and her personal luggage making a clutter in the hall, awaiting the taxi for which she was ready too soon, with an empty drag of time on her hands. Shelagh was petite, colleen-pretty and at twenty was a skilled precision cutter in the foundry, her hands as deft as her ambitions were flyaway. With her thoughts on the dolce vita of Italy or the Riviera or any other haunt of luxury she had imagined but had never seen; on the clothes, the cars, the meals she would order, one day, when - she could direct a searing flame, regulate it to a pinpoint of

precision on the closed bulb of a wineglass, sever the crystal to a hairline of exactitude and still be ready to belittle her skill as having no future at all. 'And so I'm a wow at my job. I've got a gold medal. I hardly ever throw a "second" and behind me there's a foot-to-foot chain of wineglasses that should be rounding the Equator and turning back on its tracks. And where would all that be getting me, will you say?' she challenged Loraine. To which Loraine would tease in reply, 'Where? To date, a sight further in terms of hard cash than you might get from half a dozen TV auditions, my girl,' though knowing that all argument with Shelagh's dreams was vain. Somewhere there had to be a sweepstake ticket with Shelagh's name on it and a fortune attached. Or a talent scout around the next corner. Or a millionaire uncle turning up from Australia. The one thing there wouldn't ever be was the security of a gilt- edged investment. For in Shelagh's hands money melted like hail under an April sun. Some of it spent willynilly on necessities; some of it frittered; some of it given away. But none of it ever hoarded against the rainy day which wouldn't ever come. On the strength of the pay rise which followed the medal she had rented her flat. Her next rise went towards a second-hand car she could not afford. So that she jumped at the chance to share the flat with Loraine, prophesying graphically that they would be as cosy as a couple of currants in a bun, without an inkling of Loraine's misgivings and regrets. Cosy? Yes, that - in a neat square box with an identical box above it and more boxes in twos across a communal lawn bisected by a concrete driveway. Each box had its own front door in a primary colour, flooring of the latest synthetics and kitchen fitments called 'working surfaces' instead of tables. But it was the long weatherbeaten facade of the house above the river, the cherished patina of oak floors and well-scrubbed kitchen deal which had Loraine's heart.

Admittedly there was a time not long ago when she had hated it briefly, and since then there was still one room which she entered only from necessity, closing her mind against the thing which had happened there, the thing her conscience still fought on wakeful nights. But one room was not the house, and her loyalty to that had flooded back. There would be suburban peace and a long view to blue hills on the edge of the country. But how she was going to miss the occasional far glimpse of the sea from the back attic windows of the brown house, and the early morning tramp of feet and the sputter of scooters and the bicycle bells which signalled the arrival of the day's shift in the works ! Now she was alone in the house and the glass floors were silent; the 'chairs' vacated and the crucibles empty until they would be readied again for Monday's first shift. Then the fantastic rhythm of crystal-making would begin again, as stylized as a ballet, frenzied yet ordered, according to a pattern of art centuries old. There, ready and white-hot in the crucibles grouped round the central furnace, would be the 'batch' - the simple natural concoction of silica and lead and potassium. And there would be the 'chair' - the team of 'gaffers' and 'servitors' and the 'footmakers', thrusting their tubes into the mass, timing the moment for its moulding and its fashioning on the lathe-like arms of the actual 'chair' into wineglass or goblet or vase in the few seconds it took for the malleable molten bubble to take shape and turn into recognizable, frangible glass. After that the pattern would calm. There would be a weaving to and fro of the 'takers in', carrying in tongs item by item from the chairs to the annealing 'lehr' - the endless moving belt which travelled the pieces at an almost imperceptible pace until they were cold.

And so to the precision machines and the skilled brushes of the design-markers and the magical dexterity of the cutters and intaglio engravers; on from there to the acid bath which served to put all the colours of the spectrum into each glinting facet; to the final polishing and sorting, and so at last to the cosiness of wood-wool nests and the romance of packing-cases labelled for all over the world. That was how it had been ever since Loraine could remember. Home was the brown house fronting the river and the busyness and noise of the glasshouse an inseparable part of it. Home had been her mother's province and for a Short, now misty while of Loraine's life, the glasshouse had been her father's. Then 'Mother' had ruled there too until the English stranger named Simon Clay had come on the scene to set himself to a determined courtship of the lovely Ellen Starr. He had married her, outlived her and during the few years of his ineptitude had brought Lairge Crystal to a pass which Loraine was thankful neither her father nor her mother had lived to see. And now another stranger had stepped in ... another of the same blood and no doubt of the same kind. 'In glassmaking as, admittedly, her stepfather had never claimed to be, but not 'of' crystal-making as Loraine's own family had been for generations back. A - a Philistine who hitherto had made glass by the yard for greenhouses and bottles by the gross for chemists, and who would regard Lairge Crystal, no doubt, as a mere sideline, instead of the dedication, the way of life, it was to her. He had taken the brown house from her - for what? To live in, he claimed. But for how long and how often, considering his real interests must be in that mass-producing sprawl of a glassworks in a Birmingham suburb? So he thought he could run Lairge Crystal with only half an eye on it? Well, the Irish had a name for his kind. An absentee landlord, that's what he was, she brooded with dark satisfaction that she had found so apt and disparaging a label for him.

No furniture had arrived for him yet, though he had telephoned that he would be coming over himself on Monday. In consequence Loraine had given Morag the weekend off. Nothing more Morag could do for her in the brown house, she thought, the self-pity of that about as sharp a stab as had been her sense of betrayal when Morag had, after all, decided to stay on with Ross Frere. Insult piled on injury, Morag had not even been contrite about it. 'Arrah, what use would you have for me in that two-by-four you're going to?' she had demanded. 'And what's home to me but this place that's been roof and hearth to me nearly this forty years? Would you be turning me on the street, so, when I could be staying and caring for this Englishman until he gets himself a wife, and maybe after too?' Loraine had retorted, 'Of course I shouldn't turn you out. But I had thought you might want to retire and Mother would have wanted me to help you do that.' 'Retire, is it? And where?' 'You've a widowed sister in Wexford, haven't you?' Morag had nodded. 'I have. But fold my hands in idleness in that one's house? Ah, she's a good soul and pleasant enough for a visit. But she has a tongue on her that'd wear down the ears of an elephant - No, Miss Raine, since your Mr. Frere will have me, I'm better here in my own kitchen. And won't he be the better off too, the way he might have found himself at the mercy of a fly-by-night girleen with a notion of the wages she's worth about as high as her skirt-hem? What's more—' the old beady eyes had softened, 'isn't it a good thing now that I'll be here where you'll know where to find me, instead of away to Wexford or beyond, where I couldn't be sewing on a button for you or taking in a waist?'

At that Loraine had impulsively hugged her and momentarily they had clung together ... clung to the past they had shared. Morag, Loraine had reflected since, was a better realist than she. Morag accepted, where she, Loraine, kicked and stubbed her toe. But the issue was simpler for Morag. She had only to adjust to a master instead of a mistress and keep her home. Loraine was losing hers and had to yield place to a master where she had known none before. The difference between Morag's lot and her own was as cruelly simple as that. She looked at her watch, wishing she were not so beholden to Paddy Doyle that she hadn't dared to call a taxi from one of the city ranks. But Paddy was affronted if he did not get any Lairge Crystal custom there was, and though his idea of time was elastic and his cab vintage without vintage performance, yet Loraine usually booked him .. . and waited his pleasure, as she was waiting now. A quarter of an hour— She would give him another five minutes and not a split second more! Ah, there he was now— Above the beat of the vicious spring rain there was the sound of a car pulling up. Loraine slung her handbag over her wrist and opened the door - but not to Paddy's cab. Instead, to the kind of car for which the copywriters made panthers or cheetahs the symbol. In the drivingseat, Ross Frere. Beyond him in the passenger-seat, a woman, a stranger to Loraine; her head, high, turned imperiously, cendree hair shining; sleek, assured, serene. Ross wound down his window and looked out. Loraine stared at him. 'I'm just leaving. I wasn't expecting you till Monday. You said—' He cut across the implied accusation. 'Yes, well, I found I could make it earlier. I didn't suppose the place would be ready for me. Anyway, my furniture is still in transit. But I daresay what's-hername - Morag Doul - is on hand?'

'She's not. She's gone for the weekend to Wexford. I told you—' 'All right, all right. I shan't want for a roof over my head until I can settle in. Meanwhile, can I drop you anywhere? You'll have luggage? No, don't come out—' He spoke a word to his companion; his door slammed and he was beside Loraine, entailing her retreat into the hall. He looked at her stacked suitcases. 'You weren't proposing to walk with that lot, surely?' 'No. I thought you were my taxi.' 'But I wasn't—' He broke off as the telephone rang and Loraine answered it. She replaced the receiver. That was my taxi. It's going to be late - if it comes. Not the driver's fault, though. He was putting in an hour at the Belfast-Lairge soccer match at the stadium and found some rowdies breaking up his cab when he went back to the car-park for it.' 'Too bad. Ardent Belfast supporters, no doubt?' 'Surely? Lairge boys wouldn't do that to a Lairge registered car, and Paddy Doyle says Belfast were two goals down when he left the ground.' 'And now? Look, you must let me drop you. Come along.' Except for a holdall which he left to her he loaded himself with the other bags, stowed them in the boot and made introductions as he opened the car door for her. 'Cleone - Loraine Starr, my—' he hesitated, then chose 'colleague'. 'Miss Starr - Miss Lord, a friend of mine.' Then he was in his seat, asking Loraine to direct him.

Over her shoulder Miss Lord murmured conventionally, 'Of course Ross has told me about you. Too unjust of him, I tell him, to oust you from your home merely because he fancies living there himself. Not everyone's choice, that house, I daresay. But how long has it been in your family? And quite often those tall, let's face it, rather ugly houses have surprisingly attractive walled gardens behind them. Have you a garden there?' 'There's no room for one. There's only the glasshouse behind the house.' 'Oh—' For some wild reason the tone of the monosyllable made Loraine wish she could claim for the brown house a walled acreage the size of Blenheim or Phoenix Park. The cultured English voice went on, 'Then perhaps Ross isn't being so brutal to you after all? You may be glad to move out to - where is it you're going? You'll have a garden there? And some help?' 'I'm sharing a flat with a friend in one of the suburbs. Quite different, of course, but so modern and labour- saving that we shan't need help. And a garden, yes.' Utterly illogical, thought Loraine, to be on the defensive for both the house on the quay and for the mod. cons, of Tullyreagh Close almost in the same breath, considering how she loved the one and dreaded the prospect of the other. But the insistent, subtly belittling catechism drove her to it. Besides, in Ross Frere's hearing she was hanged if she would admit to regrets! Lairge did not earn the title of 'city' for its size, only by reason of its river trade and its ancient cathedral, and Ross's car made short work of crossing it and gaining the afternoon quiet of tree-lined residential avenues and ultimately the cul-de-sac that was Loraine's journey's end. She saw Cleone Lord's eye appraise the 'garden' of Number Four - a tiny apron of lawn and a narrow border - and then Shelagh came out

to help with her luggage. Shelagh, introduced to Miss Lord, asked her and Ross Frere to tea. But they excused themselves. 'We haven't yet shown up at our host's. I'm staying with friends of Miss Lord's,' Ross explained. 'People named Trent - the Edmund Trents. You probably know them?' He had asked the question of Loraine, but it was Shelagh, after a glance at Loraine, who answered with a question of her own. 'That'll be the Trents of Clonfert Park and the Flour Mills down river?' 'Yes.' 'Ah, sure we know them. Who doesn't - in Lairge?' It was a dismissal of the Trents which caused a small lift of Ross Frere's eyebrows as Shelagh put her arm round Loraine's shoulders, cut short her friend's thanks for the lift, and propelled her indoors. 'Welcome home, honey. You should be carried across the threshold, shouldn't you? Oh no, that's only for brides— Ah well, time enough—' Her warm laugh rang out as they heard the car reverse and drive away. She clattered teacups and went to switch on the kettle in the kitchenette, calling from there: 'There's a thing! Milord having a head start with the Trents! Fobbed him off, though, didn't I? Somehow I guessed you didn't want any doorstep blah-blah about them. Right?' Loraine ran her fingers through her hair a little wearily. 'Right - even if you did make them sound a bit like notorious criminals,' she agreed.

Shelagh came back, 'And are they much less, the way they've treated you since—?' Loraine corrected, 'They don't "treat" me anyhow now. They ignore me.' 'And that spineless type, son Julian, abets them!' As Loraine flinched - 'Ah, sorry, Raine. Let you know your own business, eh?' Shelagh went on, That Miss Lord was quite something wasn't she? Reminded me— Oh no!' she broke off, her blue eyes rounding. 'You didn't, by Mick's own chance, hear her Christian name?' Loraine welcomed the change of subject. 'Her first name? Yes. Rather an ornate one - Cleone.' 'Cleone! D'you tell me that?' Shelagh breathed. 'And I, 'bat-wit that I am, had a sort of feeling and still let her get away, when I should have hauled her in to tea by her ear!' 'Why? What about her?' Shelagh appealed heavenward. 'What? The girl asks what! Hon-ey! Lord. Cleone Lord. Now?' Loraine shook her head. 'I'm not with you.' 'No? Well, try hard, will you? Ever heard, have you, of our Irene Gilbert, our Sybil Connolly, their Mary Quant?' 'Oh— Yes, Cleone Lord, of course! She designs - clothes and things?' 'There, I knew you could. And not only designs. She sells - clothes, bags, accessories - the lot. Cleone Lord Boutiques all over— The English glossies—' Shelagh's monthly bill for them was colossal 'are full of her stuff, and the gossip-columns full of her. And to think of the way I missed my chance!'

'Well, whatever chance you think you've missed, you may get another. She and our new chief are on first-name terms,' said Loraine. 'They are? Or there could be another short cut if you and Julian— I mean, she's staying with the Trents, isn't she? I wonder for how long? Just a quarter of an hour with her would be all I ask.' 'But what for, for heaven's sake? Cleone Lord she may be, but she's no Mary Quant!' Shelagh brooded darkly. 'She employs people, doesn't she? Models who get themselves photographed in her clothes. I could always start behind one of her counters and work up. Anyway, what's she over here for? I suppose, Raine, you couldn't pump the boss about her on Monday?' 'I could not pump the boss about her on Monday,' said Loraine firmly. 'Julian, then, if he should sort of happen by?' Loraine allowed, 'Julian, perhaps, though he's not likely to happen by.' She appealed, 'Oh, Shelagh, what do you gain by all this? You've got a job. You're expert at it. You've as loyal a boy-friend in Donal as any girl could want. And I should think models who earn far less than you do are two a penny in London.' 'Who's talking about London - yet? Over here there's less competition and everyone says I'm the ideal Irish type. So that if Cleone Lord had a thought of a salon in, say, Dublin, I might get in on the ground floor with her, supposing I got to know her. But do you care? You'd have me working for Lairge Crystal until I'm doddering, I believe.'

'What a hope!' Loraine turned aside the taunt with a laugh. 'With your looks, even if Donal Moore weren't set on getting you, you'll always have men queuing up.' 'Oh, Donal—! If only he weren't so dull!' Shelagh sighed. And then, 'How do you think you'll make out with the chief, Raine? Going to be able to bear it, are you?' Loraine shrugged. 'How can I tell? I'm not looking forward to it. However little he knows about the job, he's bound to make changes. New brooms always do, if only to show how efficient their bristles are.' Does he—?' Shelagh hesitated. 'D'you suppose he knows about - Mr. Clay?' 'About me and Stepfather? If he doesn't, you may be very sure that someone will tell him.' 'Ah, who'd want to make trouble for you like that?' 'Possibly the Trents, for one. I can imagine they might consider it their duty.' 'But if he taxed you with it, you'd deny it? Not that your personal affairs are any concern of his, goodness knows.' 'He could think he had the right to make them his. Stepfather was his uncle, and it's not exactly a pretty story, is it?' 'But it is a story and no one who knows you could think other— Oh, by the hokey, that kettle is boiling its head off!' In mock panic, Shelagh ran and Loraine picked up her bags. 'May I go to my room?' she called. 'Do. It's all ready for you.'

It was. Neat bed under sage-green candlewick; light fibre furniture covered in flowered vinyl; wide picture window with a modern slatted blind and a pleasant view. Her own refuge, her private place while she made her home with Shelagh. But just then its bright image of comfort was overlaid in Loraine's imagination by a darker scene. Another Saturday afternoon. Another bedroom, shadowed by reason of serious illness. The whole house silent, the only sound in the room itself that of the heavy breathing of the sick man, half in coma, on the bed. Herself, sitting by his side, on watch over him, on trust to mark and report any change in his condition. And then ... And after— But no, she would not, must not dwell on that. It was all behind her. Too late to revoke any of it or handle it differently now. But if only her fate had been more kind; hadn't exacted the full penalty of publicity for her folly - of people having to know! Some of them believing her, understanding, sympathetic. Others, accepting her word but passing judgment. Others again Julian Trent's family among them - frankly doubting and even halfpersuading Julian too, she suspected. As they might well persuade Ross Frere - the one man with whom she ought surely to be granted the right to start fair?

CHAPTER TWO LORAINE found it strange, that first morning, to go to work with Shelagh, to skirt the house and go straight to the office, where Ross Frere had arrived before her, installing himself in the room which had been her stepfather's and which she had used during her stewardship for Ross. The door was ajar and he called her in as she passed. 'I daresay you'd prefer to have an office Of your own? What about the small room next door?' he asked. 'Thanks. I've already moved my things into there. But I didn't know whether you would wish me to keep it,' she said. 'Why not? You have to function somewhere. Perhaps, when you're ready, you'll advise me on the mail and we'll cope with it together.' So far, so good. Since she had to accept their relationship, the new regime, he was making it reasonably easy for her, and while they dealt with the mail he continued to do so, asking her advice and inviting suggestions. Once he commented, 'You know, it seems to me you've painted rather too grim a picture of our affairs. I've been looking into the books, and this morning's sample of orders, for instance, is quite healthy, I'd say.' Loraine was silent. 'Well, isn't it?' he pressed. 'You can't go by one day's post. But things have looked up a bit lately,' she allowed.

He threw her a shrewd glance. 'Since when is "lately"?' 'Oh, perhaps the last month or two.' 'You're too modest.' He laughed shortly. 'You've been in the saddle, haven't you, for something over four? However, let's get on. I'd like to make your tour of the shops with you. What time do you usually go?' 'No set time. Often only when somebody comes for me to sort out a snarl-up.' 'You said you went round every day,' he reminded her. She smiled thinly. 'So I do. It'd be an odd day when something didn't go wrong somewhere.' 'And then you drop everything, whatever you happen to be doing? I think I'd like to change that. I shall still make a tour every day, of course. But except in emergencies, at a time I choose myself, preferably a set time when the shops will expect to see me.' 'It won't work.' 'We'll see. Heavens!' he exploded. 'What are the foremen for? The union men? The maintenance chaps?' 'It's not always their kind of a tangle. But that's a mistake your uncle made - that only machines have problems, not people.' 'The personal touch, eh?' 'And what's wrong with the personal touch?' she flared. 1 know everyone who is on the payroll and most of their families too. As my father did and Mother too. I'm "Miss Loraine" all round and to the older ones just "Loraine".'

'I can hardly wait to be "Ross",' he said drily, and stood. 'Shall we go out there now?' They stood together on the glasshouse floor, acknowledged with nods and then ignored as the teams of makers went on with their work. As they moved on Ross stepped forward to gather a bundle of hairfine crystal threads which had dripped from an open crucible. 'You shouldn't get too many of these, should you, if your taking is being done properly?' he asked. On the defensive at once, Loraine said, 'No, but some are inevitable, and they've got a learner on that chair.' He indicated the crucible, igloo-shaped, glowing with white heat. 'What do you reckon as the life-span of your pots?' he asked. 'Ideally, about thirty heatings - ten weeks. But your uncle tried to make them last much longer - too long. I tried to tell him it would be an economy in the end to make our own instead of buying them. But he wouldn't pay a skilled man for the job, so we bought.' 'And now?' She shrugged. 'I haven't had the authority to make major changes,' she said. 'We'll go into it.' Before they regained the office the tour had been witness to two crises. In one shop the lehr delivering wineglasses for polishing had gone on strike, halting the operation all along the line, and in the packing-room the vacuum-packing machine was temperamentally delivering two defective packs to each perfectly sealed one.

The machine received short shrift from Ross. Examining it, watching a run-through which failed, he said, 'Vacuum-packing that isn't a hundred per cent efficient is worse than useless. But this thing shouldn't have growing pains - in all conscience it's old enough. How long have you had it?' 'Not very long. But it was second-hand,' Loraine told him. 'Well, it had probably better be scrapped.' Back in the office he said, 'So my diagnosis of the malady would show a picture Of false economy all through. Could I be right?' 'That's not all. But you're near enough. Your uncle always claimed to have better uses for money than to spend it on improvements for the works.' 'Whereas you weren't so short-sighted? I notice your Welfare has been neglected too.' 'Our Welfare?' Loraine flushed and bridled. 'We've a first-class record of safety!' 'You have? You're lucky. For instance, at least half the men on the glasshouse floor weren't wearing protective boots, and they should.' 'I doubt if you'll persuade them to afford steel-capped boots.' 'They needn't afford them. We'll provide -them and they'll wear 'em or else,' ruled Ross grimly. He paused. 'That puts us all square, I think, in the matter of our concern for people as much as for machines?' Loraine ignored the question. 'They hate being coerced,' she said. 'Then we'll try another tack. We'll forbid protective clothing on the job.'

'Forbid it?' She looked her bewilderment. 'You just said—' He laughed. 'I mean, on the principle that you've only to withhold anything from your countrymen and they'll go to the stake to claim it as their right!' She met his eyes and dimpled against her will. 'You're making fun of us,' she accused him. 'Yes,' he agreed gravely. 'Do you mind?' Oddly enough, she didn't. That kind of slick generalization, coming from her stepfather, had had the power to rouse her to fury. Why not then also from Ross Frere? She had arrived that morning on wary guard against him and she felt slightly disarmed. She had been prepared too to sense from his manner that Julian's family had seen fit to warn him against her. But she thought he could not have been so impersonal, so detached if they had. Did that mean then that she had exaggerated their malice towards her? Or had Julian belatedly stood up for her and dared his people to malign her? Or had Ross Frere heard the story and was merely holding his fire? As well as disarmed she felt illogically cheated of a self-defence she had the right to make. Later Ross came to her room to ask her where she intended to lunch. She had already adjusted to her lost right to Morag's good cooking. 'In the canteen,' she told him. 'Oh, I'd thought of asking you to join me today. Morag is bringing something to my room here, as I've as yet no dining-table.' (Letting her down lightly?) She hesitated. 'Morag won't be expecting two for lunch.' 'Please. I've already briefed her,' he said.

When she joined him in his office he said, 'No "shop", I think. Do you agree?' and they talked generalities over the meal. He told her he knew the Trents only through Miss Lord's introduction. Yes, she had gone back to England, flying from Cork that morning. But he was staying on at Clonfert Park until his furniture arrived. 'I didn't quite get abreast of Julian Trent's connection with you. He wasn't very forthcoming when your name was mentioned. Am I wrong in thinking there is one?' 'No. There is one.' Was it coming now? Was this where the inquisition began? Loraine played for time. 'But to explain about Julian borders on "shop",' she said. Ross looked surprised. 'Does it? Never mind. Go ahead.' 'Well, as you may have gathered, Julian is independent, except that he writes. He reports for the Lairge Times, he does satirical scripts for the radio and he freelances for some English papers. And he had that is, he and I had - an idea of his writing a history of Lairge Crystal, from way back. Right from where the Lorrainers went to England, at first to Kent and then into the Midlands, and where we broke away and up till now—' Ross nodded. 'And—?' 'Well, that's the connection.' It wasn't the whole truth, but until she knew his motive for probing about Julian, did she owe him that? She went on, 'It entails an awful lot of research, of course. I've helped him with that, and he's been working on it—' 'With good results?' 'Some. But it's pretty hard going. The actual history hasn't got very far. In fact,' she smiled wryly, 'I don't think the Lorrainers have yet

left France. But later on - later on in the story, I mean - I can help a lot more. For instance, Grandfather Malone, my mother's father, outlived my father by several years and I remember him well and his stories of his early days in the foundry and his father's too. Imagine! Grandfather showed Lairge Crystal at the Great Exhibition in Paris that they built the Eiffel Tower for! And there was a great-uncle who was a charming ne'er-do-well. And a great-great-aunt who, when women didn't, ran the foundry for years, as Mother did and as—' She broke off. 'So I do rather want Julian to get on, nearer to where I can—- That is, to where I—' She checked on all that that implied, and stopped. But Ross finished for her, '—To where you were forced to hand over to the English usurper who stepped in and took it from you? Well, it sounds a good idea. You should get Trent to press on with it, and I hope you'll let me help if I can. I've published one or two papers myself on various aspects of glass-making and I could probably find a publisher for you when you want one.' 'Thank you. And thanks for the lunch.' As the works' siren shrilled Loraine crumpled her napkin and stood up. Ross said: 'Not at all. I've enjoyed your company. You must join me again some time.' They could not have been more formal if they had had only a few words of each other's language.

Not so long since there had been a time when Julian had dropped in on most days, cajoling his way past Pat the doorman to perch on the corner of Loraine's desk and to claim, when she protested weakly at the interruption, that he was 'Press' and therefore privileged. What was more, they were collaborating on a book, weren't they? And didn't collaborators need to get together pretty often? But all that had virtually stopped some four months ago, as had also ceased the somewhat imperious occasional invitations to Clonfert

Park which had marked the Trent seniors' toleration, if not acceptance, of Loraine as the girl Julian might wish to marry. The latter she had not missed much. There was no warmth of welcome at Clonfert Park and even in the heyday of her early friendship with Julian Loraine had been wary of his mother's tongue which frequently said one honeyed thing while meaning something quite other. But Julian's defection had hurt. After their first meeting over a year ago he had laid siege to her. She hadn't wanted to get involved with him, but somehow found she had plunged deep. The Lairge Crystal History project intrigued her and on the surface it was their link. But gradually it came to matter less than Julian did, and when scandal had touched her, she thought she could have borne it better if he had staged a storming, accusatory row with her and rejected her outright and for good. Instead he still saw her, though less often. Paying lip-service, she suspected, to his parents' boycott of her, but reluctant to let her go. Whenever he sought her out now he was as airily attentive as ever. But when they were apart she did not know how much of his loyalty she had, and was too proud (or still too committed to his courtship of her?) to find out. She maintained her own fiction that while they were working on the History together she could not break with him. But his voice on the telephone could still give her a stab of pleasure; she still defended him from Shelagh and she thought she would have wanted anyone other than Ross Frere to believe she was still Julian's girl. Why then not Ross? She did not know. Pride again - lest he should hear later by some side wind that the relationship had cooled? Against that, what did it conceivably matter to Ross Frere what she was to Julian or Julian to her?

Nothing at all, she allowed her reason to argue - only for chance to make nonsense of that logic when, a little while later, it staged an incident, which, briefly and sharply, made her relations with Julian very much her employer's business and the mortification all hers. After showing a coachload of Easter tourists round one afternoon, she has just delivered them to the 'shop' where they were eager to buy souvenir pieces of crystalware, when she noticed Julian moving round the showroom, on the fringe of the group, as if he belonged to it. He edged nearer. With a wink at Loraine he asked the price of an engraved salad-bowl, made a round O of awe when she told him, then momentarily cornered her. 'I wasn't too sure of my welcome under the new order of things. Hence the cunning ruse— Where can I see you, and when?' he wanted to know. She longed to retort that she was free most evenings and at weekends, as she usually had been for him. 'In my office, as soon as these people have gone,' she told him instead. 'In your office? So the Great White Chief hasn't filched it from you? Well, that's something, at least.' 'Yes. No. That is, he has taken over. I've moved into the little room next door. Wait for me there. I'll be along.' Julian was tall, dark, lithe and loose-limbed as a cat. Long legs stretched out, he was making a shooting-stick seat of her desk when she went in. Good manners levered him upright until she was seated. Then he resumed the pose rather closer to her. "Good trade with the visitors?' he asked lightly.

'Yes. They were a party over from the North of England and they're usually generous spenders. But they will clamour for coloured stuff and I do wish they wouldn't.' 'Why?' 'Oh, Julian, I've told you before! Because I hate colour. Mother told me Father did too. He always said that it debased pure lead crystal like a wrong-proportioned ingredient in a cookery recipe. But Stepfather would make colour; we're still doing it, as you know. And now—' Loraine gestured emptily - 'I'm not likely to have any say.' 'My poor one—' Julian's finger went beneath her chin, tilting it. 'How're things going otherwise?' She shrugged. 'Like a hospital patient - "as well as can be expected".' 'Throws his weight about - of which, physically, he's got plenty?' Did Ross do that? Loraine temporized, 'Not offensively so far. But he means to be master.' 'I was afraid of that when I first met him. You knew Cleone Lord left him to stay on with us while he was moving in?' 'Yes.' She missed her cue to pump him about Miss Lord in order to ask : 'Julian, about the book? Have you been able to do any more research on it?' He shook his head. 'Not too much. I've been experimenting with a television script. But there's time enough. It isn't as if we hope to make anything out of it, is it?'

'Perhaps not. But once I got the idea and found you were willing to work on it, I did want it written, if only for the parents' sake.' 'Yes, well, it will get done. I promised, didn't I? Besides, it makes a good excuse for—' As if aware of the lack of tact in that, Julian broke off. 'Anyway, it's just that, while the Old Man has this thing about my going into Flour with a big F and while I'm determined not to, I've rather got to be able to show cash takings to prove my point, d'you see?' 'Yes, of course. I hadn't seen it that way. You can't afford to give to the book any time which could be earning you money?' 'Exactly. Awfully loth to mention it—' He smiled disarmingly. 'But listen - an idea. This place isn't yours to command any more. But when the thing is written it should be an asset of sorts. So why not ask the new management to finance it as from now?' Loraine jumped as if she had been stung. 'Ask Mr. Frere to finance it? We'll do no such thing!' 'Why not? He could afford it. He's been left a house and a going concern all for free, hasn't he? He's a business man, so he ought to see reason in "the labourer worthy of his hire" and all that. Yes, I think we'll put it to him. Or have you told him already that it's afoot?' 'I have, and he was interested. But if you don't want to go on with it, say so, and we'll forget the whole thing.' Julian's mouth took an ugly line. 'I do want to go on with it - on my terms. I'd never have asked a penny in advance from you. But this is different. If the man's as interested as all that, he can—' 'He can not! I'll not have him asked. Just you try it, that's—'

As her fury thrust back her chair and brought her to her feet, Loraine tripped over his legs and he had to steady her with a grip on her arm. 'Let me go\' She tried to shake off his hold. He laughed. 'Not on your life, spitfire. I like you this way. Like you very much. Very, very much. You're sweet—' 'Sweet!' But he held her fast and was kissing her - her mouth, the corner of her jaw when she turned her lips away from him, her throat. Neither heard the light tap of knuckles on the half-open door, nor realized at once that they were not alone. Ross Frere said nothing. Loraine, flushed, her eyes bright with anger, wrenched apart from Julian. He smoothed down his jacket and straightened his tie. 'Sorry about that.' Loraine would have liked him better if he had managed a 'Sir' for Ross. 'You could say we got carried away on the peak of a business discussion.' 'It appeared to be - satisfactory business.' Julian jerked again at the knot of his tie. 'Well, yes and no to that. But it was business, I assure you.' Not glancing Loraine's way, Julian went on, 'It's this history of your firm. Loraine is dead keen on it and I'm attracted to the idea. We've been working on it together and we still are. But she does see that it involves a lot of research. That means time and - well, I am a freelance—' 'Julian, please!' 'You mean you need to count your time in terms of cash?' Ross addressed Julian directly. 'In other words, you can't afford to work on

any project simply for love?' Not by a shade of inflection was there a hint in his tone of intended double meaning. Julian grinned and nodded. 'That's about the score, yes.' 'Well, fair enough, surely?' Ross turned to Loraine. 'If that's what the happy agreement was about when I intruded, what's wrong with it?' 'We weren't in agreement!' 'No?' He let disbelief hang in the air like a cloud as he went on, 'I've not been able to lay my hands on one of the export files. Can you help?' As he stood aside for her to go with him he said to Julian, 'Of course, if you're prepared to go on with it, the thing should be on a business footing. Look in and see me in the morning, will you, and we'll beat out terms?' In his own room Loraine found the papers he wanted, handed them to him. She said stiffly, hating the need to apologize to him, 'That — that won't occur again, I promise.' 'Don't make a mountain of it. These things happen, and the embarrassment was yours and Trent's, not mine. One word, though if you need privacy for such intimacies in the future, I'd advise you to shut your door.' Loraine bit her lip. 'By that - by your saying "these things happen" you mean you know about - Julian Trent and me?' Ross smiled faintly. 'Well, not from any confidence of yours, did I? But one hears things, you know.' "Yes. I should have told you when you asked. But it did all begin with our getting together over the History, and it hasn't been particularly serious lately.' (This need to explain Julian away to Ross! Why should she feel it? she wondered.)

'Well, I said forget it, didn't I? Your private affairs are no business of mine.' Into the way Ross opened a file and began to flick through its contents she read dismissal, but she stood her ground. 'No, but you're making the History your business, aren't you?' she said. 'Well, isn't it?' He looked up. 'Lairge Crystal is mine.' 'But its past isn't. It's my family's story, not yours. The idea of getting it written was mine, and I won't have you financing Julian for it when it can't have any value to you - only to me.' 'Oh, come, that's sheer quixotic nonsense. If it relates to Lairge Crystal it could be of value to me - provided, of course, that I approved the way it was done.' 'If you offer to pay Julian before he has produced more than he has now - which isn't much - I'll have no part in it,' she declared doggedly. 'Don't make empty threats. You are a part of it. For one thing, you're a source of a lot of the later material that can't be got from any records. You remember your grandfather and the glasshouse under your mother and my uncle, though in your present mood I wouldn't put it past you to play dumb about the lot.' 'What do you mean - my present mood?' Ross regarded her gravely. 'Correction. Plural. You're a hotchpotch of moods. Item - pique with Trent for some reason best known to yourself. Item - understandable embarrassment over being caught in a clinch. And item - the desperation of a tigress defending her young. You'll get over the first two, and with regard to the third, you'd better accept here and now that you don't have to defend any aspect of

Lairge Crystal from me. Baldly put, it's no longer yours to defend. It's mine. But we aren't on opposite sides in a war over it. When I want help from the fruit of your experience I shall expect you to give it. And when I do want help, I shan't be too proud to ask for it. But that agreed, I'm the chap at the helm. Understood?' Loraine compressed her lips. 'You make it very clear,' she said. He agreed, 'Painfully, I'm afraid. I'm sorry, but there it is. So I shall be seeing Trent in the morning.' He went to open the door for her. 'Run along now. We've cleared some air, I hope, and no one is going to gobble Lairge Crystal for breakfast, I assure you.' She managed a faint smile. 'Tempering the wind to the shorn lamb?' she asked. 'Only shearing the lamb for its own good. Then showing it the lee side of the hedge and trusting its survival instinct to know how to take shelter,' he said.

Inevitably, when Shelagh heard that Loraine had seen Julian, she wanted to know what he had to tell about Cleone Lord. 'I don't know. I forgot to ask him,' said Loraine. 'Starry-eyed! Well, from here and there I've gleaned a bit myself. She was here on a spying-out-the-land tour and she is thinking of setting up some salons to sell her stuff over here. And not only in Dublin either. Among other places, here in Lairge!' 'Here? Why on earth here?' 'And why not? Sure, aren't we the next city to Cork in Munster?'

'I still shouldn't think there was opening enough.' 'Opening, is it?' scoffed Shelagh. 'Huh! And aren't the girls of Lairge as hungry as the next for a few ginger fashions and Chelsea looks? And do they get them in our shops at present? DO they! Not to mention real fur eyelashes, or false fingernails or sheer pantie-hose— 'Rubbish. I bet you can get the lot at any one of the department stores in town.' Shelagh gave no inch. 'Maybe now,' she conceded. 'But only because, asking, we've shamed them into it. And only, in some shops, along with black looks. Take yesterday - green eye-shadow. Had old Mullen on the Parade got any? He had not. But that didn't stop him asking if it was Jezebel I wished to ape or "only one of them fillumstars that weren't much better." I told him, neither. I just wanted to lure as many boys as possible to notice my fine green eyes—' Loraine shouted with laughter. 'From this day out you won't dare to ask him even for toothpaste. As for eyeshadow - there are stacks of every colour on the chain- store counters.' 'Ah, it's not eye-shadow itself. It's the principle of the thing, don't you see?' worried Shelagh. 'A Cleone Lord salon would work wonders. Not that, if she did open one here, I'd want to be a customer for long. The other side of the counter for me, as soon as I could make it.' 'Oh, Shelagh, you're not serious?' 'Why wouldn't I be? That'd only be the first rung on the ladder, though. And if she isn't to open here and does in Dublin, say, you mightn't see me for the dust of my getting there instead.' 'You'd be mad. What would Donal say? And you've got a lease on this flat,' Loraine reminded her.

'Donal? He could say "Marry me, Shelagh" in so many words, couldn't he? Not that he could bank on my Yes if he did.' That's splitting hairs. You know he's as good as said it already, and he's only afraid he isn't earning enough yet.' 'The flat, then. I'd leave it to you. If you couldn't afford it alone you could get someone else to share. Or you'll be marrying Julian—' 'I'll not be marrying Julian.' The words, spoken aloud, surprised Loraine herself and Shelagh dismissed them. 'Ah, you say that now. But now he has had the sense and the decency to look you up again you're home and dry-if that's what you want. It'll be for you, not his people, to call the tune he'll dance to in future. By the way, has the Chief mentioned hearing any of that gossip about you from the Trents?' 'No.' 'Then you were wrong about them, weren't you? They haven't tattled.' 'I suppose not. I did them an injustice. Though—' 'Though what?' Shelagh prompted. 'Nothing.' Loraine's impulse of need - to know that Ross Frere could hear the worst about her, however garbled or untrue, and still accept her at his own valuation of her, was too vague to put into words. Too pointless. Too crazy. Too - private to share.

CHAPTER THREE FOR some weeks there were workmen at the brown house, renovating, decorating and altering - which latter Loraine told herself she had no right to resent. Not wanting to hear the worst - that when it was finished it would be unrecognizable as her old home - she refrained from asking Morag what was being done, and though it was wide open during the men's working hours, she scorned to walk in and see for herself when Ross was away in England, dividing his time between the Birmingham works and Lairge Crystal. All the same, she was surprised at how little comment Morag volunteered. Morag had always set her face firmly against laboursaving ploys ('If a woman had been meant to flick a switch when she was after mixing a cake, then she'd have been given a finger and thumb instead of two good hands') and Loraine would have expected her to be loud in protest, supposing Ross wished to press on her any later refinements than, say, a vacuum-cleaner or a refrigerator, both of which she had taken years of grumbling to accept. But during those weeks Morag kept her own counsel, her only sop for Loraine when they met being to the effect that the house was 'a different place now'; Mr. Frere had 'a different way with him.' The house 'different'? In Morag's view, for better or for worse? And Ross's sway 'different' from her own by what greater or less value to Morag? Loraine wondered. But she did not ask, too aware that it might hurt to know. Sooner or later, she supposed, Ross might ask her if she would care to see what he had made of the house, and the rest she would probably learn all too soon. In fact his invitation came when he next returned from England on the day after the decorators had finally moved out.

'Give Morag a few days to get the place straight,' he said. 'Then I'd like your verdict. Say on Sunday morning? I'm lunching with the Trents, but if I might call for you at your flat and bring you back for a drink, would that do?' On Sunday, as he showed her into the hall he asked, Do you relish or abhor the smell of new paint? I know it's anathema to some people, but to me it's nostalgic of house-moves when I was a child, with all their promise of new gardens to explore and new cubby-holes to plan.' Loraine agreed, 'I like it too. It's unique, like the scent of tomatoes in a hothouse or the smell of the paint on Noah's Ark animals.' 'I didn't know the Noah's Ark creatures had a smell.' 'Oh, they have. Or mine had, and it's indescribable. But my Ark was very old. It had belonged to my grandmother. The whole outfit is probably made of plastic now.' Surprisingly, her first impressions of the house were not painful at all. It had gained a lot and lost no dignity by being given more light, both by added windows and pale walls and gleaning paintwork. A whole wall had been demolished to make one long gracious room out of two. There was a hall cloakroom, an extra bathroom. In the kitchen Morag was coming more or less to terms with chromium taps and washable tiles while still setting her face firmly against the removal of her dresser and her table that was as functional as a butcher's block. The attic had had its dormers deepened to give on to a south-facing balcony and was pleasant with chintz and deep carpeting, as were three of the four bedrooms on the next floor below.

They came to the fourth. Ross paused with his hand on the handle. 'You'll find a major change here,' he said. 'At present I don't need so many bedrooms, so—' He opened the door. There was light there now. The window which had been a narrow sash had been given twice the width. The walls were cream; the curtains a warm tobacco brown. There were a couple of deepbuttoned leather chairs and a leather-topped writing table. A radiogram, books, a pipe rack. A man's room now, for his leisure. Not for sleeping. Nor for - dying. Not haunted any more .. . Loraine caught her breath. 'Well?' Ross asked of her silence. Not 'Do you like it?' Nor 'What do you think of this?' Just that cryptic 'Well?' into which she read that probably the whole tour of the house had led up to the opening of this one door; that he had planned the drastic alteration of the room as shock-treatment, testing her reaction to it. .. testing her. She looked it over from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall and crossed to the window. Over her shoulder, her voice taut with bitterness, she said: 'Of course Morag will have told you which room it was, and you were determined to make me grateful. That's why you went to so much trouble to eradicate every trace— Did you hear the rest of the story from Morag too? Or from - people?' He took up her phrase. 'From people. You must have realized that sooner or later I should.' 'Yes.' She turned to face him. 'Let's see, how would it go? "She has her own story, of course. But it's said she sent the nurse off duty that day, offering to sit with her stepfather herself. Morag Doul out too. A Saturday, yes. None of the glassworkers around. She knew the

danger of his trying to get out of bed. And they often try, you know, when they're— So she left him alone - and he did. She might even have—" ' The cruel mimicry of Julian's mother's precise tones got no further. In two strides Ross was across the room, his hands clamping on her shoulders, almost prepared to shake her. 'Stop that!' he blazed. 'Stop it, do you hear? And understand this. When I needed a study-cum-den this room seemed the obvious choice. Emphatically I did not - repeat not - change its character in order to force your gratitude or to heap coals of fire. Nor, as I suspect you think, did I plan it as a trap for you, to extract your version of my uncle's death. So you can cut out the self-pity and the persecution complex and the assumption that I've judged you and sentenced you without benefit of trial. Do I make myself clear?' She shrugged off his hold. 'You've heard the story. You can't not have drawn conclusions.' 'Then by way of insurance against my judging you, why didn't you offer me your version first?' 'Off the cuff? As soon as we met?' 'You could have chosen your time. At least it would have given me the chance to strike a balance.' 'But not necessarily to believe me. I've no proof.' 'All the same, no evidence from your side, no possible defence. Even your sense of grievance must see that?' She nodded reluctantly. 'I suppose so.' 'Then why not allow me the evidence?'

'Now?' 'Well, not here. We'll go down for the drink I invited you to. Come along.' He brought her the sherry she asked for and they sat in the embrasure of a window which looked out over the quay and the river. 'When you're ready—' he said easily. 'Well—' she had to gather her courage for the ugly recital - 'It's true I did know that in your uncle's condition - he was very ill with heart trouble and on the verge of pneumonia - he mustn't be allowed any effort. Also that people as ill as he was often try to get out of bed, if they're conscious enough to realize where they are. 'But his night-nurse had gone sick. We hadn't yet got another and the day-nurse had done thirty-six hours' duty at a stretch. So it's true. I did send her off, saying I'd stay with him instead. She lodged locally — she's gone back to England now - so she went back to her digs for some sleep, leaving me alone in the house. 'I sat, for a couple of hours, I think. Stepfather was either asleep or partly conscious. He hardly stirred during all that time. Then, just about four - as you know, it was winter and practically dark -1 heard a child cry outside - agonizingly, as if for help. Twice—' Ross lifted a hand. 'Wait. "Outside"? Below the window of that room, you mean?' 'No. There's no "below" there, only the roofs of the glasshouse. No, it came from this side of the house, from out on the quay. Or from the river. That was the first thought that came into my mind, that someone was drowning.' 'And so? You were faced with a choice?'

She shook her head. 'I don't think I saw a choice. Even if Stepfather had roused, which he hadn't, I'd still have gone. I had to, if— I ran downstairs and out on to the quay. But there wasn't a soul in sight.' 'No child in distress? But someone, surely, on a Saturday afternoon?' 'You forget, it's early closing day for the city and we're football crazy. There was a Munster-Leinster match on and half the population would have been at the Stadium. No, the emptiness of the quay wasn't odd if I hadn't heard that cry. But I did!' 'From upstairs, near the back of a different side of the house? However, you searched, I suppose? And waited?' 'Of course. I ran along the quay wall both ways. It was full tide and the shingle was covered, except for one bit just below here, from which a child might have strayed into the water. But there was no sign of anything in the river, though it was too dark to see far. Then a civic guard on the beat came along, and a small crowd gathered and faded away again when nothing was found. Even the guard thought I was haywire, though he promised to make enquiries and a report and let me know the result.' 'And there was none?' Loraine shook her head. 'Nothing. No child missing, nor any accident reported that afternoon. But when I went back to my stepfather's room he was—' She paused, needing to steady her lips. 'He had got out of bed and halfway to the window before he had collapsed. He was - dead.' Ross nodded slowly. 'Yes, I heard the circumstances when I was told of his death. That he was fatally ill, but he died sooner than he need have done, by reason of that effort which was too much for him. So the facts aren't in dispute, are they? He died that day as a direct result

of your leaving him alone. But you plead you couldn't foresee that and you acted by your conscience?' 'That's my story.. But that I didn't really hear any child call for help, yet still left him for my own reasons - that's theirs.' 'Your detractors', you mean? Well—' Ross looked straightly at her 'I'm afraid you must allow they have a case. Given motive enough, you could have engineered the special circumstances of that day. You've no proof you thought my uncle incapable of moving when you left him, and if you meant all along to do so, or even, at the worst, to urge him to move, you had to concoct a story with some poignant appeal - as, for instance, a child in dire trouble. You see?' 'And I'm supposed to have had enough motive, aren't I?' 'So it's said. Though you claimed to me that you expected nothing from Simon Clay, it seems common knowledge that you expected Lairge Crystal to be yours after his death. That is so, isn't it?' She agreed dully. 'Yes. Mother's will hadn't said so, but I thought she would have enjoined it privately on Stepfather to leave it to me.' 'Whereas instead she had made him free to leave it where he wished. As, if you hastened his death, you would have found out too late. So what have we? A no-man's- land of admitted motive and undisputed facts. On the one side of that, conjecture reasonably drawn from both. And on the other, one person's word with no hope of proof, and even if it could be proved it's possible to hear a shout on the quayside from that room, that's not to say there was one that afternoon—' Ross broke off as Loraine set aside her glass and stood. He stood too. Not looking at him, she said, 'Well, you've had my defence for what it's worth. And thank you for at least making the trial fair. But

supposing I am lying; supposing I had enough motive and deliberately used it - what now? Where do I go from here?' He took so long to answer that she was forced to look up. Then he said, 'If you did, you've got to live with yourself, knowing it. And if you did, I'd want no truck with you. I couldn't work with you for another hour, knowing it.' She bit her lip. 'I couldn't expect you to. And so—?' She picked up her bag. He said, 'You'd like to go now? All right.' He held her coat for her and allowed his hands to linger momentarily on her shoulders as he added, 'And so — let's see, in the morning we're putting our heads together on the apprentice scheme, and in the afternoon you're standing in for me, interviewing the new area salesman. Isn't that so?' It was answer enough, and more balm for her sore spirit than he could possibly know.

Loraine expected to spend the rest of that Sunday alone. Shelagh had gone to Tramore with Donal Moore; none of their friends was likely to drop in and there had been no sign from Julian since that scene in the office. He had duly had his interview with Ross, but she had been too proud to ask the upshot. Between them they had taken the History out of her hands, and if either of them wanted to count her in on it again, the first move could come from their side, she told herself. The idea behind it had brought her and Julian together and his early enthusiasm for it had betrayed her into dreams. Renouncing it, she felt bereft... cheated of more than a cherished project. But if Ross was using it to crack a small whip of power in her direction and Julian saw it only in terms of immediate income, then let it go. It wasn't

hers any longer, any more than Julian was hers in the way she had allowed herself to hope, believing he was tied by the same magical thread to her. With the book as their link, he had still had to see her, perhaps even pretend he wanted to. But if she contracted out, he could be free of her. What was more, she didn't herself want the Julian who had goaded her to fury and then kissed her by force and called her 'sweet'— Or did she? When, late in the afternoon, she answered a knock to see him smiling at her from the doorstep, there was again the familiar pang that was more than surprise, though less than the rapture she had once always known at sight of him, it warned that he wasn't yet just 'any man' to her. He still counted for something with her.- He wasn't to be so easily sloughed off. He smiled, 'May I come in?' and came, pretending to warm his hands at the pseudo-flames of the electric fire until Loraine resumed her seat. Then he dropped a kiss lightly on her hair and sat opposite. 'Surprise, surprise?' he invited. 'Or did you think I might be along?' Loraine said coolly, 'I didn't see why you should be, without saying you'd come. I knew you'd had Ross Frere for luncheon today.' 'Oh, you did? Yes, well, he's still there. But he was the parents' guest, not mine, and he was staying on until he goes to meet the girl-friend who's flying in on the afternoon plane.' 'The - girl-friend?' Julian shrugged. 'Just a manner of speaking. Cleone Lord. I wouldn't know whether she's his girl or not, but they do hobnob rather, don't they?'

'Do they?' Loraine added carefully, "Did they know each other before, or did they first meet at your people's house?' 'Lord, no—' Julian grinned. 'Pardon the pun! They knew each other in England before my mother met Cleone at some haute couture do in London and invited her over for the first time not so long since. The time Frere stayed with us was her second visit, and now I suppose it's anyone's guess as to whose idea it was to combine business with pleasure by their both descending on our fair city more or less in concert. That is, I suppose you'll have heard Frere is planning to be her landlord down on the quay?' 'Her landlord? On the quay? What do you mean?' Julian's eye gleamed. 'H'm? A confidential secretary not confided in? Well, well! Yes, tales out of school or no, he's going to rent her that bit of your frontage - correction, his frontage - that's at present your tourists' shop. I must say I thought you would surely know.' Loraine said flatly, 'I didn't. Anyway, he can't. It is the tourists' shop. It always has been and we must have one. It brings in quite a bit of turnover in the season.' 'Well, I gather it won't be doing it there any more. La Lord is opening a branch boutique or what-have-you, selling pretties to the natives while two birds are killed with one stone, as it were. No, I'm afraid it's all laid on, my pet. Sorry.' Angry, hurt, dumbfounded, Loraine snapped, 'What do you mean sorry? What is it to do with you? And birds with stones! For goodness sake, Julian, don't be so - so trite! What birds? What stone?' Unabashed, he grinned. 'Only sorry I spoke. As for the birds - only another way of putting the business-with- pleasure bit. I mean, what could be cosier for them both than to be raking in the shekels

alongside during the day and all their evenings their own? Not to mention commuting back and forth to England, no doubt by the same flights—? However, you don't like the subject. Change it, shall we? Is Shelagh out? What about a cup of tea?' Loraine rose. 'Yes. I'll make it.' 'Shall I come and help?' 'No!' He eyed her, hesitated, but let her go. In the kitchenette she stood, momentarily blind to her task, then mechanically filled the kettle and set a tray, despising herself for the suspicion that Julian had relished telling his story, perhaps to pay her out for defying him at their last encounter. She made the tea and went back and had to know. 'Is that what you came for this afternoon? To tell me about Cleone Lord and the shop?' she asked. 'Because you knew I'd mind?' 'Heavens, no! I've told you, I never guessed it was news to you. I'd have thought your Big Man would at least have put you in the picture. Anyway, do I have to have an ulterior motive when I look you up? Can't I just want to see you?' His surprise sounded so genuine that she had to believe him. She said, 'I don't know. The way we parted the last time, I'd have expected you wouldn't feel too sure of your welcome.' 'Oh, that I Strike it off the record. You were huffed with me, but as I told you at the time, I rather like you that way—' She flared, 'Well, I wasn't liking you particularly. I begged you not to ask Ross Frere to finance the History, yet you—'

'You didn't beg me. You dared me, and I never duck a dare from a girl.' 'A girl?' His eyes widened in mock alarm. 'Aren't you prickly? All right then, say I didn't take your dare, but that I just wasn't having you dictate to me over the book. And I was right, wasn't I? Frere saw reason. We came to terms - except that he made some rather daft conditions involving you.' 'Involving me?' 'Yes. He said you were to vet the manuscript and pass it all along the line. He'll pay now for as much as I've done to date, but from here out, section by section, it has to get the green light from you.' 'And what did you say to that?' 'What could I say? That it was O.K. by me if it was by you, although as he was the piper paying the tune, I'd have thought he'd want to have the last word. But he wouldn't budge. I could deliver the goods with your blessing on 'em, or nix to the cash, and he was leaving it to me to find out if you'd play.' Loraine felt suddenly cold. So Julian had wanted this of her, had felt none too confident of her agreement, yet had still found it necessary to claim he had come only for the pleasure of seeing her. Something died in her at that moment; with that evasive, unnecessary lie he became a stranger. And yet the fact of his needing to ask her goodwill at Ross Frere's say-so made nonsense of her resolve to leave the whole affair to them. Briefly on Julian's side against her will, she knew she wouldn't refuse him, and didn't — and despised the relief she saw in his face.

He carried it off airily. 'Of course I knew I could count on you. As I told Frere, I didn't much care for the pistol at my head, but it made no difference really. Just you and I in partnership on the thing as we've always been—' Loraine shook her head. 'Not quite. In future you'll be writing it and I'll read it and pass it—' 'If you don't like the way I'm handling the material you don't have to pass it.' 'Don't I? You want to collect your money, don't you?' 'Well, of course. But it's not as simple as that. Frere says' he's looking for it to be a human sort of document rather than a dry-as-dust record, and you've got to help me with that side of it!' Loraine said hardly, 'We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Meanwhile you've a couple of centuries to cover before you'll need any family hearsay from me. Besides, even then you'll have to follow Ross Frere's recipe of what he wants the result to be. As you point out, he's paying.' 'But—' Julian moved impatiently and set aside his teacup with a clatter. 'Loraine, what's come over you? You've changed! You've gone sour. Why, you couldn't play more thorny or more martyred if I'd jilted you instead of—' She met his eyes stonily. 'Instead of?' she invited. But he was saved a reply to that as Shelagh and Donal Moore came in, wanting warmth and welcoming the tea which Loraine made freshly for them.

'Brrh! It was cold, down at Tramore,' grumbled Shelagh. 'Not a soul on the sands, and no wonder, the way the wind was coming off the sea with the cut of a knife.' 'It's still only April,' Loraine reminded her. 'Nearly May. What's happened to spring lately? Has somebody diverted the Gulf Stream or something?' 'You should have tried keeping warm by hopping round the Metalman's pillar on Newtown Head,' Julian suggested. 'Afrah, him!' A downward flap of Shelagh's hand dismissed the great cast-metal landmark they all knew. 'Good for warning ships off the rocks he may be, but haven't I been lepping on one foot round his base every year since I left school, and has he brought me a rich husband within the twelvemonth yet? Has he!' Donal - quiet, Shelagh's butt, her shadow, her willing slave - put in mildly, 'It's news to me the Metalman ever promised a girl a rich husband for hopping three times round him at one go. Just a husband, I always understood.' 'And who'd go to all that trouble for any but a rich one?' Shelagh flashed back. 'Well, would you?' she appealed to Loraine. Loraine shook her head. 'Don't ask me. I'm no judge. The first time I did my stint round the Metalman I was seven and I'd have been embarrassed with a husband, rich or poor. The next time I tried I overbalanced and touched his base with my hand, and if that happens you aren't supposed to try again that year.' 'But you've tried since? How old were you then?' demanded Shelagh. 'Eleven,' said Loraine, and amid the general laughter knew she was avoiding Julian's glance.

The subject was changed. Shelagh erupted - there was no lesser description for her rapture - at Julian's news of the projected deal between Ross Frere and Cleone Lord. 'D'you say that?' she marvelled, wide-eyed. 'You mean, it's settled? She'll be moving in and needing staff and - and models? There won't be any slip-up now?' Julian laughed shortly. 'How should I know? Loraine thinks that bit's for her to say.' 'Raine does?' Shelagh turned. 'Is it?' she puzzled. 'Of course I see you couldn't tell me while it was all in the air. But you do go along with the idea? You wouldn't throw a spanner in the works now, would you, even if you could?' Loraine said, 'Not "would". I'm going to. It's as much news to me as to you. I can only think Mr. Frere doesn't realize how much turnover the shop does in the season. There's no reason why he should yet. But I'm going to see he has second thoughts about wiping it out and letting the premises to Cleone Lord.' 'Oh, Raine!' 'She can get another place to rent somewhere else in the city.' As Loraine began to stack the tea-things Julian rose. He said to Shelagh, 'Thus spake the oracle, and she should know her powers. No, Shelagh dear, you're on a cliff-hanger until Loraine sorts it out with her chief. Which, at a guess, will be not later than nine a.m. tomorrow. Right?' he glanced at Loraine. Tight-lipped, she nodded. 'Right,' she confirmed. 'I thought as much.' He looked at his watch. 'Well, I'd better be getting back. There's to be some sort of drinks do on at home for the

Lord woman. A pity, that. Otherwise we could have given ourselves a night on the town.' Loraine said quickly, 'I couldn't have come out anyway. I've brought some work from the office and I haven't looked at it all through the week-end. I must do it tonight.' 'And I've got to wash my hair. Come along,' Shelagh ordered Donal briskly. 'I'll drive you home first and come back.' Donal protested, 'I thought we were going to a film at the Dominion!' 'We're not now. Time enough, another night. If Cleone Lord is weekending with Julian's people, I'm going to ring her first thing in the morning and ask for an interview.' 'And what would all that have to do with tonight?' Donal queried. Shelagh regarded him pityingly. 'My hair, dumb! Supposing she would see me, could I go to see her looking like this?' With which piece of unanswerable feminine logic Shelagh swept Donal from the room and with an airy kiss blown in Loraine's direction, Julian went out with them.

During a too-wakeful night Loraine had pondered how circumstances had the power to weathercock feelings as if at the touch of a switch. Yesterday she had parted from Ross Frere, with her mood eased; the edge of her self-pity blunted; her prime emotion, gratitude for his trust in her. Yet at the idle signal of Julian's gossip, up had reared her defences again and when she went to his office in the morning she was spoiling for a fight she told herself she must win.

Ross was expecting her. Earlier he had propounded an apprentice scheme to stop the rot of wastage from the craft and Loraine had welcomed the idea. But this morning it was only by a supreme effort that she concentrated on her chiefs plans for terms of indenture, 'sandwich' courses for youngsters still at school and their prospects of employment when they had 'done their time'. It was something, she supposed, that he wished to discuss it with her. But he had it all cut-and-dried. He talked. She listened. This was what he had meant when he had warned her that he, not she, was at the helm now. This was the new broom proving its efficiency. This was the intruder making a virtue of his trespass. Well—! At last he said, 'We'll circularize the schools, asking them to interest their school-leavers. Draft something, will you, on the lines I've indicated, and let me see it.' And then, 'By the way, I'm dispensing with the shop and leasing the premises to Miss Lord for a branch showroom. We're signing the contract in a day or two; she will redecorate at her expense and will move in as soon as the place is ready.' As levelly as she could Loraine said, 'So I heard from Julian Trent last night. He supposed I knew. But you can't be serious! You can't wipe out the shop just like that. In the season we have tourists from all over the world, and shopping for Lairge crystal is partly what they came to Lairge for. The profits from the shop pay us for the time we give to showing them round the place. At the end of every tour they are clamouring to buy, and it's sheer madness to forgo all that money when they're only too anxious to spend it. Even your uncle—' she made the taunt deliberate - 'wasn't as short-sighted as that!' Ross regarded her calmly. 'Have you finished?' he asked. 'For the moment - yes? Well then, perhaps you'll be good enough to consider how many - or how few - passers-by call in to the shop wanting to buy souvenir glass from us.'

'Why, hardly any. But we don't use the window on to the quay for display.' 'And now - how many of your visitors aren't shown the museum room before they leave?' 'Well, none, I daresay. We make it the highlight of the tour.' 'Exactly. So will you tell me why the shop shouldn't move in with the museum? Say the "not for sale" historic pieces and the experimental stuff and our raw materials in display cabinets on three sides and on the fourth the showcases and the counter from the present shop. There's ample room for both, and it's an intelligent use of valuable space. It's also sound sales technique to house the unattainable alongside the stuff that has a price. Or haven't you ever drooled with envy of the exquisite out-of-reach and then spent the little more than you meant to on the next best thing? Well?' Why had he invariably all the answers? Cornered by his logic, Loraine found nothing to say. At last, lamely- 'I'm sorry. You seem to have thought of everything, and I had no right to assume you meant to do away with the shop. And I suppose if I say I don't much relish the prospect of a gowns-and-accessories boutique cheek-by-jowl with Lairge Crystal, you'll call that snob of me and point out unarguably that we - I mean you — can do with the rent which Miss Lord will pay?' Ross nodded. 'Just that,' he agreed. 'She is paying handsomely to get what she wants, and she wants premises with a frontage to the quay.' 'I can't think why. Hers will be the only retail shop, and the Parade or Michael Street would be far more suitable.'

'You're prejudiced. You don't want to think why. But Cleone—' he used the name easily - 'sees more character in the quay, and I agree with her.' 'And how many customers does she hope will find her shop down here?' 'I think she would hardly be as successful as she is if she hadn't ways of attracting clients. Besides, on your own showing, Lairge Crystal gets plenty of visitors who find it.' 'Mostly conducted coach-parties.' 'Private tourists too, surely? No, I'm afraid you're right about your snobbery. You take conscious pride in the craftsman's contempt for the retail counter-jumper, which just isn't on in this day and age.' Loraine shot her final bolt. 'Well, can you see a shop that sells - sells buttons and bows and things doing anything at all for the quay or for Lairge Crystal?' she demanded. 'By way of image, you mean? Let's say it should brighten the quay on a dull morning, and in consideration of its boost for our finances, I daresay I can take the buttons and bows. But that's a realism you'd go to the stake rather than admit.' That's not fair. Everyone knows women can be better realists than men!' 'In general, perhaps. But not when they have a chip on their shoulders or an imaginary ewe lamb to defend. Either tends to jaundice the eye.' She fell back on irony. 'I notice that when you need a comparison you tend to run to lambs,' she said. 'Shorn ones, ewe lambs...'

'Do I? Yes. I suppose because in your case they seem to apply.' Ross levered himself from his chair and came round his desk to stand over her. 'When are you going to learn to come to terms with facts without all this intensity, I wonder? Don't care so much! Relax. Let go. I know you feel dispossessed, but with the loss of this place, haven't you gained any peace of mind? Latterly it couldn't have been much of a picnic for you?' She doodled on the cover of her notebook. 'No, but—' 'But you believed you had only to serve your time and you would own it? Then I stepped in; didn't hand you your cards and did something for your ego by patently needing your co-operation. But as long as you see that as your licence to pinprick and carp and hector me on petty issues like a shrew, then we aren't going to make much headway - together - on the big ones. You see that?' Reluctantly she warmed to that 'together'. He had never used it before. But she scribbled on, not looking up. 'How do we agree on which are minor issues and which major?' she objected. 'Don't worry that I'll leave you long in doubt as to the difference,' he warned. 'And—' his hand went firmly over hers, stilling her nervous pencil - 'stop fencing with me now, will you? You know I'm right. Suppose we abandon those lambs and follow my analogy of the nagging wife. You and I may have only a shotgun marriage in Lairge Crystal, but in any marriage there must be a head of the house who takes the decisions and shoulders the load and foots the bills, and I'm that head, do you see?' She glanced up then. 'And I—-?' She despised the archness of the question too late. He considered her gravely. 'If you were other than you are, I think you'd be only too glad to play the skittish little woman and leave the

worrying to me. As it is, I doubt if you've heeded a word I've said. You still see yourself as too committed to abdicate or even to delegate anything to me. No, I'm stuck with you - as you are. You'll still cavil and scold and give in only when you have to - when even your obstinacy admits I'm right.' She stood up, pushed in her chair and turned to the door. 'You might not always be right, as you could find out too late.' 'Huh! Small risk of that, with you at my elbow to chant "What did I tell you?" Only, Loraine—' he paused until she turned to meet the appeal of a smile that narrowed his eyes attractively - 'keep it as subtle as you can, will you? Play it cool like a clever wife? Give me credit for mostly knowing what I'm about, even when you're convinced I'm nowhere on the beam?' She smiled back. 'I'll try.' 'Good girl.' He returned to his chair, but she still lingered. 'Yes?' he invited. 'Nothing.' She went out, wondering what he would say if she had confessed to the moment of truth she was experiencing in her thought - He doesn't realize that this time we haven't been talking about the same thing. I'm not honest. Today I'm not fighting him over Lairge Crystal at all. I'm fighting Cleone Lord. I don't want her here. Not just her shop, but her. Why? Whatever answer there might be to that, she didn't face it.

CHAPTER FOUR THERE was no arguing Shelagh out of her determination to ask Cleone Lord for a job. She telephoned Clonfert Park three times in one day, to hear twice that Cleone was 'engaged' and on the last occasion to be told by a maid that if she would state her business and give her address Miss Lord would file them for reference and might get in touch when she was engaging staff. Meanwhile Miss Lord was sure Miss Maille would appreciate that she was on a private visit to Lairge .. .? Snubbed, Shelagh replaced the receiver. 'And we all know what that means,' she grumbled to Loraine. 'It's what agencies say to models and actresses to get rid of them - "Leave your name, dear", they say. You hear it all the time on TV and it's meant not to mean a thing.' Loraine sympathized, 'I know. It's very off-putting, though I could wish you didn't want this job so much. Or see it as a kind of "Open Sesame" which it may not be at all.' 'Well, I do see it that way,' Shelagh insisted. 'It's the only way I'll ever get away from Lairge. Or rather, the only kind of escape I want. I mean, not just into a better job in my line in crystal, but into a different world where I'll have a chance to be somebody and get rich. But - "when Miss Lord is engaging staff" ! When is that likely to be? Months, I suppose, if the tourists' shop has to have its dolling-up first.' There, however, Shelagh's timing was at fault. ' Within a week of the signing of the lease and with a despatch quite alien to Lairge's easygoing workmen, the adaptation of the shop was in hand, and even Loraine had to acknowledge that it was being done with taste. The fascia was painted in a soft grey, the window carpeted in grey velvet, door and window backed with dull gold drapes

concealing the interior, and both scrawled in gold with the facsimile signature 'Cleone Lord'. And it was when it had reached that stage of prelude that the girls were surprised by a call by Cleone at the flat. Shelagh answered the door. 'Oh—!' Taken aback, she retreated and Cleone followed her in, saying, 'You phoned me, didn't you? About a job with me? When they gave me your address, I realized that I had met you that day when Ross and I weren't free to stay to tea with you. I was sorry if I was a little curt by proxy about ringing me at Clonfert. But you understood? Anyway, as I was passing, I thought I'd call and put you through your paces now. Oh, please don't go—' she broke off to address Loraine on her way to the door - 'We aren't going to talk secrets and I daresay—' a disparaging glance took the measure of her surroundings - 'that except for this room you haven't anywhere else to sit but in your bedrooms?' Shelagh smiled happily. 'Or the kitchen, where you have to wedge between the sink and the cooker!' She added her plea to Loraine. 'Do stay, Raine. I've got no secrets from you.' Cleone sat down and addressed Shelagh. 'Tell me what you do at present and why you want to make a change?' she invited. I'm a cracker-off at Lairge Crystal and—' 'A cracker-off?' Cleone wrinkled her nose. 'What on earth? It sounds as if you were making hardbake or fireworks !' Shelagh laughed. She described her work and Loraine put in, 'It's a highly skilled job and very well paid, and Shelagh is extremely good at it.' 'I see. Then why consider leaving it?'

Shelagh spread her hands emptily. 'Oh, because - well, I know it all and I'm tired of it and—' —'And there's no glamour to it and it's glamour you crave, eh?' At Shelagh's rapturous nod Cleone went on, 'I thought so. I've been as young as you myself. And it's just not fair, is it? All the starshine of the heavens above you and only a humdrum job at your fingertips. Day after day the same ... I know. No wonder you rebel. And you — you simply want to work with lovely things and help clients who don't need to count pennies and meet lots of interesting people, is that it?' 'Oh yes, that's just it. How you understand!' breathed Shelagh, reminding Loraine of a young rabbit in the hypnotic power of a stoat. Cleone smiled graciously. 'Do I? Perhaps I know how I'd chafe myself, shut up in a stuffy factory crackpotting, or whatever it is you do. Why, for a child as pretty as you are, it's your birthright to break out. Though you wouldn't, of course, expect to earn at first as much as you probably do now?' Shelagh agreed with this rather abrupt switch to practicalities. 'And why would I expect it? If you'd have me, I'd be prepared to work at first almost for - for love!' 'Yes, well, I wouldn't ask quite that of you. Just, say, a week of probation or perhaps two, while I assess what you may be worth to me. As a counterhand, I mean, at the boutique I'm opening on the quay. Naturally, with no experience behind you, I couldn't put you into any of my larger branches or my salons. You understand that?' Though a shadow crossed her face, Shelagh agreed again, 'Sure I know I'd have to start at - at the bottom. But later? Supposing I did well—?' She left the rest of the question to dangle.

'Ah, later - who knows?' Airily Cleone met surmise with surmise. Then, with an air of having done with any star- shine nonsense, she added, 'That all depends on you, doesn't it? How hard you work? How willingly you learn?' 'But there would be a chance - just a chance - that one day I might model for you?' 'Model?' Cleone must have heard the sharp rejection in her tone, for she softened it at once. She went on, 'Well, I don't know— Yes, perhaps. Stand up, will you? Let's see your lines. M'm .. . Now walk .. . turn ... no, with a sweep, child! That's better. Yes, well we shall have to see, shan't we? You're true to type, at least.' Shelagh glowed. 'And isn't that what everyone says - that I'm typically Irish, colouring and all.' 'Which isn't quite the present vogue, dear. These last few seasons, the leaner and hungrier, the better. Your type, now—' Cleone looked Loraine over as she rose— 'Shelagh here may have to wait a while for her looks to come back into fashion. But I could use yours - that rather haunted, wistful expression you have - more or less straight away, if you were interested?' 'In becoming a model?' Loraine shook her head. 'Thanks very much, but I've neither any ambitions nor any talents that way.' Cleone raised a hand in mock defence. 'All right, I only asked! Merely an idea I had - that the way you're placed now in relation to Ross can't be all honey for you. Neither fish nor fowl nor ... Well, just a shade ambiguous, no?' She turned back to Shelagh. 'When could you be free?' Shelagh appealed to Loraine. 'When could I?'

Loraine said, 'You're paid monthly, aren't you? That should mean a month's notice to Mr. Frere.' At which Cleone echoed, 'A month? If I'm to take her on at all, I shall want her before that. I plan to open as soon as I return from England next time. But Ross and I are flying to London together one day this week, so I'll fix her release with him then. Just leave him to me.' They had no choice but to leave Ross to her.

During the next fortnight there was no cloud in Shelagh's sky and Loraine had no heart for dampening her spirits. Shelagh bought clothes, experimented with makeup, went on a crash diet and listened-in to a course in French on the radio ('in case I ever get sent to Paris ... to buy, or if I happened to get a ticket for one of the couture Collections'). She was willing to allow that her own debut on the catwalk might have to await a change in fashion crazes, but that she would be there - if only as a stand-in for some world-famous model who had sprained her ankle or gone down with the mumps - she had no doubts at all. Once there she would find acclaim. People would ask who she was, why she hadn't been seen before. 'So fresh', they would say of her. 'Vivacious'. 'Kerry-black' of her hair and 'smudged-in' of her eyes. Up to date the Good Fairy who had been at her cradle hadn't been conspicuous for - zeal. But now she was doing her stuff. Shelagh was on her way and the way was up. Her warm nature made her popular at Lairge Crystal, which she left in a flurry of good wishes and as the delighted recipient of a parting gift of a dozen cut crystal wineglasses. Whereupon it became imperative that she give a party to celebrate her translation to the

world of high fashion. If she were lucky enough to choose a fine night the party could overflow out of doors. ('We could rig up a piazza - or do I mean a patio? - with pot plants and sun umbrellas on our front strip.') Agonizing over the weather forecasts became an urgent priority. Alas for the caprice of the Irish climate! After a fine clear day the evening gloomed. The pot plants could be left to enjoy the soft persistent rain, but the umbrellas had to be furled and the flat crammed to bursting point with the guests. Loraine was at a loss as to how Shelagh could possibly know so many people. But of course Shelagh did not. The score or so originals she had invited had brought friends; even the friends had brought friends, and if there had not been a fairly steady coming-and-going the affair might have been brought to a standstill of its own sheer weight. As it was, Donal Moore and Julian acted as unofficial ushers, speeding parting guests, welcoming newcomers, moving people around and keeping the record-player supplied with discs. There was noise. There was a lot of laughter. People agreed that, for all the crush, it was a 'super' party, the 'best ever'. There was 'zing' to it - or there was, until ugliness struck. Donal was at the open door and Loraine had just joined him to scan the downpour and to get some air when a formidable group silhouetted against the darkness - five teenage toughs, each with a bottle held by the neck, pressing round Donal, assuming their right of entry. Donal pointed to the bottles. 'Hey, hold on, fellers. It's not that kind of a party.'

'It's not, so? Well, it is, if we say so. Move over, will you?' growled the ringleader. "I'll not move over.' Slight but wiry, Donal stood his ground. 'We don't know you, and you're not coming in.' 'And we don't know you, boyo, nor want to.' The inane laugh was echoed by the other four. 'But we know people here and they said to come along for a welcome. A fine welcome, this!' Donal said, 'You've missed out on the one you might have got if you'd arrived without the drink you've taken and bringing more along with you. But fair's fair. Give us the names of the people who invited you along, and we'll find out if they really did.' The ringleader snarled, 'Arrah, names! Murphy, Maloney, O'Toole what's the odds? It's a party, isn't it? Give over, I say!' Keeping his eye fixed on them, Donal muttered to Loraine though barely parted lips, 'They don't know anyone. They're just trying it on. Get Julian, will you, or any male in reach; and we'll throw them out—' But as she turned things happened all at once. There was a crash. Glass splintered and flew. Liquid splashed, and brandishing a broken bottle neck, the leading tough lunged at Donal, to be foiled by a smart rugby tackle below the knees. The whole scene erupted. Julian and some other men dashed in. There was a pile-up of bodies and threshing limbs at the door; somebody picked up the telephone and called the civic guard and Shelagh's voice - though surely from rather a long way off? - said, 'Why, Raine darling, you're hurt! Look at your arm ... at that blood?

The room spun, the walls zoomed inward and out again ... steadied, and Loraine came to from her momentary blackout. 'Silly!' she adjured herself and, as she realized the melee was over, the toughs routed, added urgently to Shelagh, 'For goodness' sake, cancel that call to the guard. I saw somebody making one and there's no need—' Shelagh agreed, 'Sure there's no need. I'll get Donal to call them to say they're not wanted, that we have the whole thing in hand ourselves.' 'You mean that Donal had,' Loraine corrected. But Shelagh had already gone in search of antiseptics and bandages for the gash on Loraine's arm. It was bathed and bound up - by Donal, proving himself as deft and gentle in first-aid as he was gamecock in the face of toughs. Somebody quipped that, considering how Loraine was committed to glass, you wouldn't think a broken bottle would have the nerve to try to carve her up, and amid the general laugh at that the tension eased and the party got going again. When the numbers had thinned until there were almost enough chairs to go round, Shelagh made black coffee and people sat talking until there was a concerted move to leave. Earlier - since the fracas Loraine had missed Julian for a time. But wherever he had been, he was around again when the party broke up, and after promising to phone her in the morning to see how her arm was, he left with the others.

Loraine's bandaged arm did not escape Ross when she went in to his office the next morning.

His nod pointed to it. 'Trouble? What?' he asked. 'Nothing very terrible. A gash from some broken glass. A bit deep but quite clean.' 'Broken glass, eh? Here? When?' 'No, at home, last night. Somebody was - sort off brandishing a bottle and it flew and caught my arm.' But if she supposed that closed the matter she was mistaken. Ross frowned. 'Fooling around with a bottle? A pretty daft trick, wasn't it? Or—' his pause held calculation - 'was it less daft than plain criminal crazy? And at a guess, some connection with - this? As he spoke he flicked round to face her the top one of the three morning papers on his desk. It was the local daily, the Lairge Times, which frequently took reporting from Julian. Ross's knuckle thumped a headlined paragraph. 'I mean that,' he said. The headlines seemed to leap. Staring, feeling sick, Loraine read Rough-house At Wild Teenage Party. Police Called. And the text. Names ... Shelagh's. Her own. Lairge Crystal. Tullyreagh Close. Followed by a half facetious, half censorious, and less than half true account of the affair. As if to convince herself the words were actually there, Loraine read them partly aloud, then looked up. 'But this is absurd! It was Shelagh's thank-you party for all her friends here, and it was perfectly orderly until—' 'Orderly? With people tossing broken bottles around?' 'No one at the party so much as swung a bottle anywhere!'

'I beg your pardon, "Brandished" was your own word, I think. And if it was all that decorous, why were the civic guard called to it?' 'Oh, they weren't called! Or they were and then cancelled. The whole upset that this has magnified—' a finger stabbed at the paragraph 'was over in a matter of minutes. It was simply a lump of gatecrashing rowdies, claiming they'd been invited and turning ugly when our boys wouldn't let them in. One of them deliberately smashed the bottle he was carrying and came on. That was how I got cut. Then the boys mixed it with them and they made off. And that was all there was to it. All!' 'I see. If they hadn't been invited, how did they know a party was on?' Loraine compressed her lips, simulating patience. 'Look,' she argued, 'Shelagh invited quite a gaggle of her friends and, as it was to be an out-of-doors affair, I suppose she gave them carte-blanche to bring their friends along, which they did. But it turned out a wet night. We had to herd everyone into the flat with all the windows open, and anyone who thinks in this day and age that a party of young people in a two-by-four isn't going to make itself heard from outside just isn't with it. And that's not a bottle party either. Nobody brought any drink. We'd laid on lots of soft stuff and sandwiches and some beer for the boys, and that was all.' Her glance at Ross told her she had made some impression. He said less critically, 'You must have known beforehand how overcrowded you were likely to be. Why didn't Shelagh ask to use the canteen? She would have been welcome. And didn't your neighbours complain at the noise?' 'They're tolerant. They were mostly at the party anyway. And it didn't occur to either of us to ask for the canteen.'

'I can't think why. However - this story. If there's really no truth to it, who is responsible for it, do you suppose?' "I don't know. Or—' Suddenly Loraine had remembered Julian's brief absence from the party. Could he have slipped out to telephone this tuppence-coloured version to the paper? But why should he? 'It could just have been Julian,' she admitted. 'Julian Trent? He was there?' 'Yes, and he reports for the Lairge Times, as you know. But he helped to throw out the mob, and I can't think that he would want to make a thing of it or - garble it so.' 'Well, I think we'll find out.' But as Ross reached for the telephone Loraine said, 'You are ringing him to ask him? If you get him, let me speak to him, please?' 'If you like, though I shall listen in. We're getting to the bottom of this.' Ross dialled. 'Clonfert Park? May I speak to Mr. Julian Trent? I see. Well, perhaps you would ask him to come to the telephone. Ross Frere of Lairge Crystal here.' Ross covered the mouthpiece. 'Your friend is still in bed,' he told Loraine. 'Yes? Julian? I have Loraine here. She would like a word with you.' He handed her the receiver and flicked the extension. Loraine said, 'Julian? Did you write this twaddle in the Times?' She thought he stifled a yawn. 'Oh, is it in? Sorry, darling, 'fraid I've only just surfaced. Good party, wasn't it - as far as it went? Did you enjoy you? I enjoyed me.' 'I'm glad.' Too conscious of Ross, of his inscrutable expression as he listened, Loraine pressed, 'This paragraph - did you write it or not? Or needn't I ask? Who else could have done?'

'Who indeed? Not that I actually wrote it. I phoned it to the night editor. Has he made a good thing of it?' 'Good?' It's a pack of lies. The guard hadn't to be called. It wasn't a "wild" party. Why did you do it?' 'Just for a giggle. And because anything about teenagers whooping it up and tangling with the police is news these days. I'm a professional reporter. I happen to have a living to earn - remember?' 'You've no right to earn it this way at Shelagh's expense !' 'Not at Shelagh's? That's rich!' Julian's short laugh was not pleasant. 'Why, that's why I went and used a phone-box - to lay it on as surprise publicity for her? Why, she'll eat it!' 'She'll do nothing of the kind! She'll hate it!' 'Like to bet? No, are you sure, Raine dear, that it's not just you, taking all this silly umbrage because you think you're above a bit of innocent publicity? Are you sure?' In her heart Loraine knew she was not sure. Not 'above' publicity. Afraid. Dreading any more tattle concerning her. Yes, she was pleading her own cause as much as Shelagh's. But not for the world, in front of Ross, would she admit to Julian's flippancy how defenceless against tongues she felt still. She was ready with a haughty denial for Julian when a signal from Ross checked her. 'I think I've heard enough,' he said. 'I'll take over. If you'll go back to your room I'll call you when I want you,' and when she hesitated, 'Please—! That's an order.' He took the receiver from her.

Whatever passed between him and Julian, Loraine was going to have to find out from Julian, she realized. For when Ross summoned her again to his room he made no reference to it. He had some files of sales statistics before him. He said: 'About our colour ranges. Not that I promise to agree with you, but what is your candid opinion of their worth to us? I'd like to know.' 'Well—' feeling her way, Loraine said, 'there's a steady sale for them.' Ross waited. 'And?' he suggested. 'Or were you going on-"but"?' 'And,' she said firmly. (She mustn't be unfair to colour:) 'And we've got a lot of it in stock. And they love it in the North of England. And it sells to American tourists from the Middle West. Which means dollar currency and all that.' 'Then you're in favour of continuing it?' 'No. That is -1 wouldn't.' 'Why not?' 'Because—' she repeated her father's dictum that colour debased lead crystal and added, 'I don't like it. For me it's a personal thing. Even in crystal it reminds me of hoop-la stalls. You know - you throw a quoits-ring and "Sure, isn't it the lucky girleen that ye are - the way you've won a fine vase that'll grace your wedding-breakfast table and that'll last ye all your life till it's filled with funeral flowers for your wake"?' Her exaggeration of the brogue that was the merest lilt in her normal voice brought a smile from Ross. 'You make your point,' he said. 'I shall drop colour.' Loraine stared. 'Just like that? You can't! The books are full of orders for it!'

'Which side are you on? Make up your mind,' he retorted. 'Of course we shan't discontinue until all the present orders have been honoured. But there has to be a moment of decision for or against, and this is it. We concentrate on pure crystal when we've filled our existing commitment to colour. Does that meet both your misgivings and your preferences?' 'Yes. You - really wanted to know what I thought before you decided?' 'Should I have asked you if I hadn't?' he countered. 'And you think I've got something? What I've said has influenced you?' Ross drew down the heavy hornrims he wore for desk work and looked at her over them. 'Don't fish,' he advised. 'I told you, didn't I, that I'd tap your experience when I needed to, and this matter of colour was a "needing when" occasion.' It's also, thought Loraine as she waited to take his dictation, about the first time in anything that matters, that you've asked me, not told me. Whether or not he intended it, she read into that a hint of fellowship which she knew she wanted quite badly to last.

She was to wish she had taken Julian's offer to bet on Shelagh's reaction to his waspish reporting. For Shelagh's dismay matched her own - for fear, in Shelagh's case, of the harm it might do her with Cleone Lord. Loraine soothed, 'I shouldn't worry too much. She's in England until you open, isn't she? I agree she might not like it, but she won't have seen the item and probably will hear nothing about it at all.' (Shelagh

was lucky. For her it was the gossip of a day, no more. For Loraine it held menace. For in the hands of Julian's people, it could be twisted into the one more straw of calumny which her good name would not bear.) 'The Times should be made to apologize!' 'Small hope of that. They only printed the story as Julian gave it to them.' 'Then Julian should apologize. Anyway, unless you invite him, Raine, it's the last time he'll cross the threshold of this flat,' Shelagh claimed. 'He doesn't always wait to be invited, I've noticed,' said Loraine dryly, and met Shelagh's speculative glance. 'That sounds as if you were cured of him at last,' said Shelagh. II seem to remember telling you some time ago that I wasn't going to marry Julian, soon or late,' Loraine reminded her. 'Mm. But that's not necessarily being cured. It's quite possible, they say, to be still hopelessly hooked on a man long after you've realized it would be suicidal to marry him.' Loraine laughed aloud. 'Just as well you qualified that bit of theory with "they say". For it's something you wouldn't know from experience!' Shelagh bridled. 'And why wouldn't I, pray?' 'Because, according to you, dear,' said Loraine sweetly, 'you'd never fall for a man at all against your better judgment of what his bankroll was worth to you!'

Adroitly Shelagh sidestepped that. 'Ah, but that's me. You're different. You do go in at the deep end without checking the depth. I know you did for Julian. But if you've really got over him, I'm the one that's glad for you. Only, Raine, don't ask to get hurt again like that. Look first, will you, hm?' Passing behind Loraine's chair as she spoke, Shelagh ran a finger lightly along Loraine's neck under the fall of her hair, and Loraine shivered. 'What's the matter?' 'Nothing. Just that your hand was cold.' But it was Shelagh's wouldbe-sage warning that had struck the colder on Loraine's spirit. She could promise Shelagh's concern for her with a heartfelt 'I'll try', which she did, though pointing out that, owing to Ross Frere's dictum about the History, she would have to see Julian from time to time and probably at the flat. 'Well, that's all right,' Shelagh allowed. 'Just so long as you've taken that one's measure, and I think you have at last.' So did Loraine. But had she learnt anything at all from Julian? Was there any gauging the danger of plunging too deep - next time - until it was too late to draw back from all the pain of rejection and renouncement she had suffered over Julian? Well, except for her obligations to him over the book, she had managed to draw back from Julian for good, hadn't she? Surely could again if she had to? And why should she fear that her 'next time', if it happened, shouldn't offer all the excitement and hope and warm security of an answered love, instead of another rebuff?

For she wasn't already at the brink of a second time of loving... was she?

CHAPTER FIVE WHEN the Cleone Lord shop window was dressed for the first time a gold thread culotte dress flung carelessly on a Chippendale chair, a gilt snake of necklace and a pair of thonged gold kid sandals - the local comment debated, 'And who, by the hokey, does the good woman be thinking she'll sell them things to - the bargees?' But as Ross had predicted, Cleone knew all about attracting the clientele she wanted. Without seeming to advertise her opening at all she achieved for it a sense of smart occasion and an eclat which was to throng the quay with cars and to bring everyone she needed to the 'by invitation only' sherry party which was to precede the opening proper. Loraine had been invited and so had Ross, though he had to be in England at the time. Loraine, guessing that Julian's mother and her set would certainly be there, had not yet pleaded a previous engagement when Ross told her he hoped she would accept. 'You'll be standing in for me,' he said. 'If I were to be here Cleone would expect me to lend her some moral support, and someone from Lairge Crystal should look in, if only to show we forgive the set-up for its enticement of the best cracker-off we had. Tell me, what on earth induced young Shelagh to throw up a skilled job like hers to go into this dress racket at the bottom, do you suppose?' Loraine said, 'I knew she'd been restless and spoiling to make a change for some time, and I think she believes her chances under Miss Lord are bound to be endless.' 'Well, I hope Cleone warned her that it's only the very few who get within sight of the top in her profession. Didn't you tell her that she could be chasing rainbows?' 'I did try, and she has known for ages how valuable she is at her job. But perhaps—' Loraine hesitated as she worked it out - 'perhaps

there's a limit to how far one ought to tread on other people's dreams, don't you think?' Ross cocked an eye at her. 'No line to be drawn between sound ambitions within range and pure pie-in-the-sky?' he queried. 'But who has the right to say which are which?' He nodded. 'You've got something there. Possibly it's just one's own that are always ambitions and only the other fellow's which are willo'-the-wisp. Anyway, you'll go along on Tuesday for a while, won't you? And another thing - I'm lending Cleone a few of our pieces from the museum for her preview. They'll be collected late on Monday and I'd like you to check them back before you leave on Tuesday night. O.K.?' 'Yes. But which items? I shall need a list.' 'I've left a suggested one with Mary in the shop. The four-gallon champagne flagon as a kind of piece-de- resistance. It's always good for a bit of awe that it could ever have been filled. And some decanters, and one or two of the intaglio goblets of last century. I'd also be rather proud to include the goblet that was engraved for your grandfather Malone's ninetieth birthday. But that's for you to say.' Though Loraine felt a churlish impulse to refuse, her hesitation was only momentary. 'All right, let it go. And if you think I ought to, I'll accept for Tuesday,' she said. She joined the crowds in the salon just before the showing of the latest Cleone Lord creations began. The air was loud with 'Darlings' and heady with warring perfumes. Cleone, poised and elegant, moved among her guests, introducing to them her deputy, a high-glossed woman in her thirties, and once calling forward Shelagh for a patronizing ruffle of her hair and a word - 'This is Myra Calcott's

little junior. Yes, entirely my own discovery. Quite the genuine homespun colleen, isn't she? Dewy—' in response to which Shelagh visibly glowed, as if she were lighted from within. The models who showed the clothes were an overnight importation from England; a posse of willowy, sloe-eyed lovelies with scarcely a glance for the little grey- tunic'd figure who reverently drew aside gold curtains for their comings and goings, caught up their carelessly discarded cloaks and furs and dreamed her own dreams of a time when she would be one of them . .. When the parade was over the circling began again. Everyone told everyone how very badly Lairge had needed notice from the haute couture world, even in the small way of a salon-cum-boutique. A toast was drunk to its success. Cleone was congratulated; the massed flowers were admired, the decor extravagantly praised. The display of Lairge crystal attracted much attention. 'Yes, lovely, isn't it? Some of it almost priceless, I believe,' Cleone announced within Loraine's hearing. 'A loan to me by Ross Frere. A tremendous favour, but he absolutely insisted. Yes, I know' - her laugh rang out, 'in those days champagne must have flowed, mustn't it? And that piece - modern, in fact quite recently cut, but Ross included it to show how his craftsmen have lost none of their cunning. It was intaglio-engraved by an old man who is still with Ross after more than fifty years at his job. A commemorative goblet for - oh, for someone's, I can't recall just whose, ninetieth birthday. But it's the engraving that's of interest. Whoever he was, it shows scenes from his life, a portrait of him, even his favourite dog— Yes, do examine it more closely if you'd like to. Shelagh dear—' Hemmed in by the press of people between her and it, Cleone beckoned Shelagh to hand down to her Grandfather Malone's goblet from its shelf. 'Pass that piece to me, will you?'

Shelagh reached for it, touching it with awed care. But before Cleone could take it from her a gloved hand - Mrs. Trent's - intervened, fumbled the exchange - and the delicate thing was a mere shatter of glass on the carpet. 'Oh no—!' Fingers to her lips, Shelagh's gasp was the only sound to break the shocked silence. Then Julian's mother was protesting to Cleone: 'My dear, I'm so sorry! So very sorry! Perhaps I shouldn't have— But when I saw how the girl was handling it, I thought—' And Cleone, collected again, was assuring her, 'Please don't blame yourself, Mrs. Trent. The purest mischance, as far as you were concerned.' And turning upon Shelagh, 'Child, child, how could you be so clumsy? What were you thinking of? You needed to have it in your hands only a split second or two, and yet—!' At which, unable to bear the sight of her friend's stricken rejection of guilt, Loraine interposed, 'I'm quite sure you shouldn't blame Shelagh, Miss Lord. I happened to be watching her and I know she would have handed it to you safely enough if Mrs. Trent hadn't tried to take it from her first.' 'Well, really!' The older woman turned a glassy stare upon Loraine, under which the latter did not flinch. 'I tell you I saw the thing was in danger. You surely don't imply that I deliberately interfered without reason?' Loraine shook her head. 'No. I only say that if you hadn't, I'm convinced the goblet would have reached Miss Lord's hands unharmed.' 'Which amounts to accusing me! You'd like Miss Lord to believe that the girl didn't drop it? That I did?'

'I only know that it fell from your hands, not Shelagh's,' Loraine said with quiet reason. 'Of course it was an accident. You fumbled it between you. But I do say that on balance the fault was more yours than hers.' Mrs. Trent drew herself up, appealed to her hostess. 'Cleone, this is too much! I cannot, will not stand accused of—! By a— Guest of yours though she may be—' Beside herself, she finished no phrase she began until Cleone, flicking a finger at the broken shards of glass, ordered Shelagh, 'Clear it up and I'll see you later,' smiled at her guests, 'Please folks, think nothing of it. Fully insured, of course, and even if I must play it by ear, I feel that Ross Frere may forgive me— and tucking a reassuring hand beneath Mrs. Trent's elbow, moved away with her. Making sympathetic sounds, other people moved off too. Shelagh knelt to her task and Loraine helped her, and a vacuum-cleaner swallowed the more irrecoverable scintillas of Grandfather Malone's goblet. Shelagh gulped, 'I suppose Mr. Frere will want the pieces to claim the insurance?' 'I daresay. I'll see that he gets them.' 'You do know, don't you, Raine, that it wasn't my fault? You weren't just saying it for pity of me?' Shelagh appealed. 'Of course not. I know it wasn't your fault.' 'It wasn't either,' Shelagh agreed eagerly. 'I had it quite firmly and I'd have—'

She broke off as Cleone, alone now, tapped her on the shoulder. 'Hush, child. Keep your voice down. We all know you weren't to blame. Now forget it,' Cleone ordered. Shelagh's eyes widened. 'But, Miss Lord, you did blame me! You said—!' 'Of course. What did you expect? Mrs. Edmund Trent is a client, and if you learn only one golden rule from me, young woman, it'll be that the client is never to blame.' Shelagh bit her lip. 'Even when—?' 'There is no "even when". In business the operative word is "Never",' Cleone corrected crisply. 'Meanwhile you should be thankful that, being modern, the thing was probably one of the least valuable pieces Mr. Frere loaned to me.' 'But it wasn't! Well, maybe it was in value, compared with the rest. But it was cut for Loraine's - I mean Miss Starr's - grandfather before he died. It was an heirloom of hers, d'you see?' breathed Shelagh. 'Your grandfather? An heirloom?' Cleone turned to Loraine. 'Now really, that makes me very angry with Ross. I shall tell him he had no right to include a possession of yours without asking your permission!' Loraine said shortly, 'He did ask it, and I gave it.' 'You did? Too sweet of you— So now I must make amends, mustn't I? How, though? I know! You must choose anything that attracts you from the Collection we've just shown, and Myra must debit it to me.' Loraine shook her head. 'I'd rather not, Miss Lord, thank you all the same.'

Cleone's eyes snapped. 'Why not? A Cleone Lord number isn't to be sneered at, surely?' 'I realize that, but I really can't accept, if only because Shelagh is wrong about my grandfather's goblet. It's true it was cut for him. But he willed it back to the museum when he died, and I've no more personal claim to it than I have to anything else belonging to Lairge Crystal.' Tch! What a quibble!' More shrewdly than Loraine liked, Cleone went on, 'I suspect you really mean you don't care to feel obliged to me. I wonder why—? However, I've no intention of twisting your arm. I shall tell Ross he must persuade you. For you probably wouldn't make any of the same difficulties about accepting a douceur from him as from me?' Loraine flushed. 'In the matter of something which neither of you owes me - just the same difficulties, I'm afraid,' she said, and turned away.

She knew she was caring a great deal that Ross would understand her scruples, and she was not disappointed. He said quietly, 'I can't tell you how sorry I am about the goblet, Loraine. I've broken the news to old Doughty and he has offered to make a copy of it. He still has the designs he worked from and would gladly do it for love. But I've an idea you'd feel it wasn't quite the same thing?' Loraine agreed, 'It wouldn't be. There'd be no point to a copy as Grandfather Malone is dead. But it's good of Liam Doughty to offer to do it for his sake.'

'I rather gathered that the "for love" bit meant for love of you,' said Ross drily. 'But you're right - the value of the original was in its occasion, and a copy couldn't recall that. So I can only repeat how much I regret having loaned it at all, and hope that time may throw up some other family occasions for Doughty to commemorate.' Relief at his not forcing redress upon her helped Loraine to smile. 'Such as? You can hardly expect Doughty to live to celebrate your ninetieth birthday,' she said lightly. Ross laughed. 'Heaven forbid I should still be in harness then! I'd hope to have earned my pipe and my chimney-corner long before that. No, I was thinking in terms of more attainable milestones marriages, births, comings-of-age. Didn't the Lorrainers hand down any tradition of saluting things of that sort?' 'If they did, nothing has survived. As far as I know, my grandfather's goblet was the first. It was the idea of all the workmen we had then who had grown up and grown old with him. They subscribed to it in secret and we had a party - dancing on the quay and fireworks on the river, and Grandfather did a reel with me. I was ten at the time,' Loraine said, remembering aloud. Ross laughed. 'I'll call it a day if I'm equal to doing a reel at my retiring age, let alone at ninety. Have you laid on any such junketings since? What about your own twenty-first birthday?' 'Last year?' Loraine's face shadowed. 'No, your uncle would have thought it a great waste of money, and so it would have been, the way we were heading downhill.' She changed the subject. 'By the way, about Bridie Ryan - I'm beginning to wish I hadn't suggested she could take on Shelagh's job.' 'Bridie Ryan?' Ross concentrated. 'Oh yes, we stepped her up when Shelagh left. Why, what's wrong? Promotion going to her head?'

'I don't know. She used to be our next best cracker-off to Shelagh. She struck a bad patch of work last winter, but she improved again, and when I told you I thought she was equal to Shelagh's job, I hoped she could cope. But lately she's cutting about five seconds to every perfect, which simply will not do.' 'It certainly won't' Ross's pencil tapped his blotter. 'She's had the job let's see, a fortnight? It could be it's too early to judge. What's her background, do you know?' 'Yes. She lives in Stoneycross Lane, just off the quay. Young, as you know; married with young twins and a rather dour husband. He works at the Trent Flour Mills and I've heard, though not from Bridie, that he claims there's no need for her to work too. She should stay at home and look after the children. If that's so, I imagine it could be a bone of contention a good deal of the time.' 'Hm. Domestic conflict. It's answerable for a lot of shoddy work, and accidents on the job. As far as you know, did anything in particular foment the Ryans' differences at the time you say Bridie's work took its last toss?' 'I wouldn't know about that.' 'Nor about any present trouble, if there is any?' 'No.' 'Then we'd better give her the benefit of the doubt. Say another month or six weeks before we supplant her. If she's only suffering teething troubles on the new job, she'll get over them. But if it's anything more serious than that, we'll think again. Do you agree?' His decisive tone implied that it would be all the same to him if she did not, and when she lingered his 'Yes?' was crisp.

'Do you want Bridie told that she's on trial? That her work must improve - or else?' 'Better not, I think. Knowing they're on a stint of probation is good for the ego of some people; for others it's sheer murder, sends them to pieces. Anything else?' 'No.' But leaving him, she did so to the tune of a half-formed phrase in her mind, and alone in her own room she tried it aloud. 'He ... measures up,' she said, wondering what she meant by it - and suddenly knew. That Ross Frere did just that. Measured up. She recalled with a blush her snap judgment of their first day - that, like Simon Clay, he had no time nor use for the personal touch. Yet this morning he had outdone her in charity towards Bridie Ryan's background troubles, and earlier the true instinct she had hoped for from him had kept him from Cleone Lord's gaffe of trying to bribe her in kind for a loss which wasn't strictly hers to regret. Ross had known there was no redress in his power. She had been completely wrong about him. He had nothing in common with Simon Clay except the power which the latter had abused. Her sore supplanted pride had actually wanted Ross to do the same, to make the same mistakes or, worse, to fail. And so far he hadn't. Nothing particularly velvet glove about his methods, but already his touch on Lairge Crystal's affairs was sure and shrewd; on her own, often cruel to be kind. But still - kind. She was remembering how much she had cared that he should believe her version of her stepfather's death. And he had, with a faith in her which had warmed her spirit. Yet why had it mattered so fiercely that he should? What queer alchemy had been at work even

then, turning her hostility into a desperate craving for the goodwill he hadn't grudged her - measuring up, not falling short, not failing her as Julian had done? What? Of course she knew the answer, little as she wanted to. Understood too that her recoil from Cleone Lord was jealousy, no less. Also why Shelagh's warning had chilled her - she had plunged again too deeply. Ross Frere's sympathy mattered to her because the man himself had come to matter - too much. She was in love more headily than she had ever been with Julian; dangerously, utterly vainly, with the stranger she would have named as her chosen enemy no later than a month or two ago. In so brief a time he had become the one importance of her life, counting even more with her now than her birthright to Lairge Crystal. And all without himself either knowing or caring but simply by his being the man he was; dominant, assured, positive ... male. Yet, cruelly, his male touch, his male desire, his male pursuit not for her. Between him and her no secret glances which meant more than they said to an onlooker. No contriving of occasions to be alone together. No recalled embraces. No sweet unnecessary letters. No shared magic. Only, for her, one-sided pain. For this - Loraine shivered - was what uninvited loving was all about. You asked to be hurt where no hurt was intended, because the loved one had no awareness of his power with you. There were times ahead, she knew, when Ross might send her spirit rocketing with a word of praise, a casual hand's touch, some chance gentleness; other times, equally likely, when their wills would conflict, or his indifference would brush her off or he would wither her with some criticism she deserved. Whenever or however, he would not care overmuch about her reaction to either. Nor must he guess. For if he did she suspected that the same core of kindness which was one of the things she loved in him would pity her and show it. And that she knew her tattered pride, her undermined command of self would not be able to bear.

Though Julian had turned in another section of the History he had left it by hand at her office and made no effort to see her. She came to the conclusion that he had decided to be done with her, as she was done with him, and it was matter of no concern to her when she heard he had gone on a fishing holiday with a friend. Shelagh made no secret of her relief at this outcome. She had never cared for Julian; liked him less when, after Simon Clay's death, he had left Loraine in doubt of his loyalty, and had no good word for him after his paltry joke at the expense of her party. 'You'd not have listened to me when you thought you had only to ask him and he'd pull the moon from the sky for you,' she told Loraine. 'But-wasn't he the careful one, keeping a foot in both camps the minute a word went round against you? And would you have seen him again at all if you weren't in the way of helping him to money for his old book?' she wanted to know, putting into words only what Loraine suspected was true. Meanwhile Loraine, watching developments, disenchantment for Shelagh in her new job.

was

fearing

Cleone Lord's vague hint of 'a week or two' of probation stretched to a month before Shelagh earned more than a pittance, and then far less than her pay at Lairge Crystal. True, she earned commission. But this counted only on her own sales, which were few, the lion's share of the customers going to the glossy Miss Caldecott. As the only junior the branch rated, all the sweeping, dusting and polishing fell to her. She would not merit a holiday with pay for twelve months and when the models who had graced the opening day had departed, the gowns for sale were displayed on plastic figures; orders were taken in the seclusion of Miss Caldecott's private room,

and for the rest the shop was no more than a showcase of dress accessories - costume jewellery, belts, scarves and bags - and Shelagh merely its junior counterhand. " But Shelagh, perceptive enough in Loraine's affairs, but with no realistic eye for her own, had as yet lost no faith in the untoward which was to launch her into the dizzy world of haute couture - one day. Who was to discover her, who sponsor her, was not clear. Certainly Myra Caldecott did not appear to be dazzled by her junior's flair, and if Shelagh were counting on Cleone Lord's personal notice, she would wait a long time, Loraine judged. For though Cleone commuted frequently from England, staying at an hotel or for weekends with the Edmund Trents, her visits to the quay boutique were brief, though her hired car would stand for a long time outside the brown house while she lunched or took drinks with Ross. Morag Doul, her allegiance still cautiously divided between Loraine and Ross, had her own comment on these sessions. 'Sure and it could be he'll be asking her to stay for good one of these days,' she told Loraine. 'For she means to have him, and where's the sense in a man of his age holding out against a woman if he hasn't his eye lighting for one he likes better? But if she wants to take over the house again she can be whistling for me to serve her. I'll make do with it the way it is, if that's the way he wants it. But let her be after persuading him it'd be the better for a bit added here and a bit cut off there — and I've heard her at it - and I'll be off out of the place before I'm in danger of losing my way up the stairs!' It was at a time when Cleone was in England and Julian was still away from home that Ross posed a dilemma for Loraine by asking her to partner him to an informal evening affair based on Clonfert Park.

'You'll have heard about it,' he said. 'It's a ticket-cum- invitation thing, a car treasure-hunt being laid on by your local Spastics Society. The rallying-point is at the Park and the Trents are giving a buffet-supper first. Will you take pity on me and come along?' How to answer that, reluctant as she was to accept anything at the Edmund Trents' hands? Loraine played for time. 'I did know it was on, but—' Ross misread her hesitation. 'Well, I realize you'd be going with Julian if he was here. But as he isn't—?' 'It isn't that. In fact, I bought a ticket, though without meaning to go, with Julian or without. It's just that—' 'What then?' She knew the signs. Inexorable with evasion as always, he meant to have the truth. She began again: 'Well, it's just that since I collected that scandal over your uncle's death, I've rather avoided the - the circles where the scandal was talked.' 'You have? Isn't that rather hyper-sensitive of you?' 'Perhaps. But I've enough pride to want to save people the embarrassment of meeting me.' Ross retorted, 'That's not pride. It's a charity you can't afford. Acquaintances take you at your own valuation of yourself. In other words - creep under a stone and that's where they'll let you stay. Besides, old gossip needs to be fed to stay alive, and no one that I know is uttering a word against you now.'

He meant well, she thought, but that 'now' had been revealing. 'Maybe not in your hearing,' she said. 'But there's still some feeling against me, I know.' 'All the more reason for showing you've nothing on your conscience. Anyway, which of your pet ogres are you likely to meet at Clonfert Park? No, I'm going to insist you accept. I'll call for you at your flat on Thursday at seven and take you along with me,' he said. And couldn't know, of course, how little she really wanted to deny herself the sweet danger of an occasion which to him would be merely an evening spent in the aid of a worthy cause.

In fact she was to have little to fear from her first visit to Julian's home since the scandal. The drives were a-block with cars and the lawns with people. The Buffet- supper was a self-service affair in a marquee and their host and hostess had little time or notice for individuals. The evening sun was still high when Ross and Loraine arrived, but was dipping towards the mountain outlines before the clamour of supper was over and people were queuing to collect their first clues to the treasure-hunt. This was an easy one. No one puzzled for long over the legend 'His eyes are blank, He cannot see. How then can he Stare out to sea?' - before there was a stampede towards the cars. Everyone was taking the road to Newtown Head and the great figure of the Metalman

which topped it, his hand outstretched in warning to shipping of the treacherous rocks below. Just before Ross and Loraine had left there had been the makings of the kind of moment which Loraine had dreaded. Mrs. Trent had paused by their car, flicked a glance at Loraine and addressed Ross. 'Such a pity that Cleone is missing this!' she said. To which Ross had replied briefly, 'Yes, too bad,' and had put the car in gear and moved off. The Metalman proved to be generous with his clue. A card slung over his arm made a 'base promise' — which sent everyone searching round the bottom of his plinth for the sealed envelope whose message sent the party on to locate a particular beach-guard doing late duty on Tramore sands. So far the treasure-hunters were of one mind and their cars in procession. But the clue entrusted to the beach- guard proved more subtle; many people misread it and went off on a false scent, and at the next correct point the numbers had thinned. So also at the next point and the next, though Ross and Loraine were still hot on the trail. At the next, however, they confessed themselves baffled. They had arrived alone at a signpost on a country road where the clue was partly in clear and partly in Morse, but to which was appended a message that defeated them. They pored over it together— 'Sign in, sign out, Do it with a cross. Unless the X is witnessed,

Then that's your loss.' The third line was starred and the starred footnote read 'Independently witnessed or it does not count.' Ross said, 'Double Dutch. We've met our Waterloo with this one. I'm completely foxed.' Loraine agreed. 'So am I. But we've read the clue all right, so can't we go on?' 'I imagine we'd be disqualified if we did, without solving this. Seems we have to show a witnessed signature to something or other. But what? And where do we find an independent witness to whatever it is?' Loraine shook her head. 'I wouldn't know. "Sign with a cross ... an X" — why not with our names?' she was musing aloud when another car drew up behind them and Ross said: 'The slaughter is on. If it's that sixty-four-thousand- dollar question couple who've always been first away up to now, I'm going to enjoy this - seeing them go down for the count!' But Loraine, looking back, said, 'It's not. It's Shelagh and Donal Moore.' She alighted and went to meet them. 'What do you make of this one?' she asked. 'We've had it, we're afraid.' She, Ross and Shelagh stood by while Donal decoded the Morse. 'Easy, that,' he said of it. And of the rest - 'I know what this means too.' 'You do?' the girls chorused, and Shelagh ordered, 'Give!' But Ross made a gesture of closing his ears. 'Not to us, though. Fair's fair, and it's stopped us dead.'

Donal, however, was wearing his slow grave smile. 'We've got to share it; can't help ourselves. Besides, I haven't really solved it. It's not original and I've met it on another affair of this sort, down Kerry way.' Shelagh stiffened. 'Another treasure-hunt? You never told me! Who was with you at it, if you please?' A pause. Then, 'Sure, a girl - who else?' said Donal blandly, claiming a rare moment of power which Shelagh acknowledged with a grudging, 'Huh!' Donal went on, 'It's a trick clue. There have to be at least two couples at the check-point working it out, because each pair has to witness the X for the other lot, d'you see?' Shelagh commented, 'Clear as mud, that. What is the X we have to witness? What does it mean?' Donal grinned. 'Same as it does at the tail of a love- letter - a kiss.' 'A kiss? You mean that we—? And they have to—?' a glance at Ross and Loraine. 'Then we sign for them, and they - You mean you solved it on this other do you were on?' 'Not alone. Like now, there was this other fellow and his girl handy and we made a guess at it between us.' Shelagh affected awe. 'Just how bright can you get! So you and this girl - did? And I suppose you'll be telling us that at the latter end you Walked off with the treasure too?' Donal shook his head. 'We did not. There was an uglier clue waiting to floor us later on.'

'Good. Then let's be on our way—' With which her forefinger beckoned him closer and her face, uplifted, demanded rather than suggested it should be kissed. Donal made the most of his opportunity and Ross, laughing, glanced at Loraine. 'Well, what about it? For the sake of the cross on the dotted line - do you mind?' he said, and turning her into his arms, kissed her with deliberation on her resistant mouth while, irrationally, she shrank under the touch which her dreams had craved and would again. He released her, looked over at Donal. 'Good enough?' 'Fine.' They exchanged signatures on cigarette cartons, then returned to the cars. But Ross did not follow at once when the other two drove off. 'You did mind,' he said. 'You've no use, have you, for kisses which don't mean a thing?' 'I - don't make a habit of them.' She hoped he might reply - though why should he? - 'I'm glad.' Instead he retorted, 'That's obvious. You've so little expertise. Just as well we haven't to qualify on performance, or we'd be well down the field behind friends Moore and Shelagh.' 'It was different for them. They—' 'Enjoyed it? Well, I could have done the same, given a spark of cooperation!' he taunted so lightly that she found herself relaxing enough to retort with equal flippancy, 'I'm sorry. You should have warned me what was expected of me, and I'd have done my best!'

Arm crooked over the steering-wheel, he turned to look at her. 'And supposing I held you to that by doing mine?' he parried. Trembling a little, fearful of all that her response might betray to him if he meant to kiss her again, she forced herself to play along with his mood. 'You might find yourself sadly disappointed,' she said. 'I wonder—?' But at the point at which the accepted pattern of empty flirtation should have led him to try, he only continued to study her face in the half-light of the car. He turned front again. 'No,' he said. 'No, Loraine - keep your best for when you want to give it. When and where you can't help yourself. It could be worth the waiting.' He could not know that the Where of her need was here and that the When was now.

CHAPTER SIX SHELAGH and Donal must already have gone ahead at the next point, where the laconic clue 'Your slip is showing' held no mystification for Loraine. 'Petticoat Loose, of course!' she decoded in triumph. 'It's a crag above a corrie - a mountain lake, you know - not so very far away. Petticoat Loose was a water-sprite who married a mortal. The fairies drowned her lover in the lake; she threw herself to her death from this crag, and she's supposed to have haunted the place ever since.' 'Right. This way?' As Ross took the road Loraine indicated he commented, 'I thought fairies never died - even for love? And why Petticoat Loose? How did she come by that name?' 'She could die, because marrying the man had made her mortal too. And Petticoat Loose because when she does her haunting she trails long filmy skirts behind her. Of course it's really the mist rising off the lake. But you'd never get any of the old people who claim to have seen her to admit that.' A mile or two farther on, where a stonewall bordered the roadway and a gleam of water was to be caught here and there between the trees, they left the car and made their way on foot to the lakeside and, under Loraine's leadership, round it to a spur of rock where, sure enough, the next clue - the last of the trail - awaited them in a box illumined by a roadman's lamp. Ross unfolded the paper, read it with a frown, handed it to Loraine. 'Journey's end or dead end - which?' he queried. 'In verse again too, just about as execrable as the rest.' Loraine read, 'Once seen never forgotten.' Her lips framed the doggerel which followed.

'No seeing eye to mark the view, No ear alert to hear the wind. But standing high, I am your cue, Read me aright and you will find.' She looked up. 'Poetic licence - you have to rhyme "wind" with "find". And - "standing high . .." Yes.' She bit her lip. 'Yes, I think I know - only it's so far from here. Miles.' 'What is?' 'The place I believe it means. It's a great rough stone cairn, about as tall as the Metalman and standing much higher - right up a mountainside where you couldn't take the car. There was this man, you see, who once lived up there and who loved the fabulous view so much that he asked to be buried upright to enable him to go on enjoying it, and the cairn is supposed to mark where this was done.' Ross laughed. 'Suicidal fairies and panorama-mad eccentrics! Have you any more potted biographies up your sleeve, by any chance? Sounds as if you could be right, though. How far?' 'Oh, nearly to the Tipperary border. I doubt whether—' 'Whether we'd have been sent so far afield, you mean?' 'Yes. And it's getting very late.' 'What of it? We're nose-down to the quarry now and the opposition seems to have thinned to vanishing point. On your way!' Ross's hand went firmly beneath her elbow "until they regained the road and the car. It was a long way of map-reading by hand-torch for Loraine, but at last she called a halt near the top of a winding pass between mountains whose tops were not to be discerned against the night sky. She switched off the torch and pointed ahead.

'The road goes on and up for a bit, then over and down to the Tipperary plain. That's the view, and up there, around a bluff—' she pointed to the right of the road - 'is the cairn. You can't see it from here even in daylight. It faces out over the plain.' 'And now we take to Shanks's pony?' 'I'm afraid so.' As they climbed, at first by an easy grassway, then over rougher scree and the slippery air roots of pines, Loraine suffered fresh doubts of her reading of the clue. She said as much to Ross, who agreed it was odd that they had neither overtaken nor been followed up by any of the other competitors for so long. But having come so far they had nothing to lose by pressing on, he argued. Nor would he have it that Loraine had been wrong about the clue. The calm marked their journey's goal, he was convinced, and if some more astute or speedier couple had beaten them to the treasure - too bad. 'Also-rans we may be, but at least we'll have completed the course!' he rallied Loraine. But, the cairn gained, it yielded nothing. At each of the earlier points there had been a planted pennant to show that the previous clue had been read aright and that the next was to be sought thereabouts. But here there was none, nor any sign at all that either clue-layers or cluefollowers had passed that way. The cairn reared, conical and bleak; a startled, benighted sheep skittered away downhill to its grazing levels. Ross's powerful torch rayed up to the peak of the cairn, down and around in a wide arc, and on a small discomfited laugh Loraine said, 'So I was wrong after all.' Ross echoed, 'So you were wrong, though I didn't think you were.' Facing out towards the darkness, he rocked back on his heels to support himself against the cairn. 'Anyway, the old chap knew what he was about. The view from here must be quite something by

daylight. You've got a lovely, unspoiled country, Loraine. But you've always known that, of course?' She nodded. 'Always.' She spoke flatly, suddenly depressed by a sense of anti-climax. She turned, her hands in the pockets of her short suede coat, drawing it close. 'I'm sorry. Now we've all that way to trail back.' Ross turned too. 'What of it? At least we travelled hopefully, which is supposed to be more rewarding than to arrive. Or, as my good mother put it when I'd missed out on some treat - "Never mind. You had it to look forward to" - which for sheer grown-up impudence you must admit is hard to beat!' Loraine laughed at that with him. His mention of his mother gave him background of which she longed to hear more. Loving people, you became greedy for every detail of all that had gone to make them what they were, and tonight, for some reason, she wouldn't be shy of questioning him if they hadn't now to concentrate on the tricky descent to the road. She rejected Ross's proffered arm, claiming she thought she could pick her way over the hazards of scree and bramble better alone. They chose their own paths; sometimes he went ahead, sometimes she did. And it was when she had gained so many yards that she was out of range of his torch that disaster struck. She stopped, looking back for him. He called .'Wait!' and she answered - at the moment at which she lost her footing on a glassy tree-root, fought wildly for balance, fell and found herself rolling, half sliding down the abrupt fallaway which had halted her above. She clawed at weeds whose frail roothold gave way under her grasp and her feet scrabbled in vain at the loose scree which came down with her. Painful yards of this. The fallaway became steeper, turned

into a cliff. Nothing then but to brace herself for the inevitable fall to whatever lay below, however far. At the cliff edge she had gained enough control to make it less than a dead drop. It was partly a jump which brought her sprawling eight feet down as a sickening stab of pain shot upward through her ankle. Within seconds Ross was there, jumping sure-footed to kneel beside her. 'That's what you get for being so cocksure. Why didn't you wait when I called to you?' There was an edge of asperity in his tone. 'I did. I was— Then I slipped and I couldn't get back on my feet. I did a kind of avalanche and had to crash.' 'Are you hurt?' 'My ankle, I think.' Ross turned his torch on its puffiness. 'That's a sprain if ever I saw one - that is, if it's not a break. Can you stand on the other leg? No, don't try to put that foot to the ground—' With his help she stood, feeling a little sick and shaken. He looked her over. 'All right everywhere else?' She felt her hip gingerly. 'Only a bit bruised here and there.' 'Well, what do you expect? Here, take this—' Handing her the torch, he stooped to> put one hand behind her knees, the other round her shoulders, making nothing of her weight as he lifted her. She protested, 'You can't—!' 'And you can't walk!' He set off easily downhill, the only sign of his burden being the quickening of the heartbeat which pulsed dangerously close to her own. In his arms - for such a stupid, humiliating reason! Later she would thrill to the memory of his

nearness, as she would to the memory of his kiss, both thrust on him by the necessity of the moment, and neither likely to happen for her again. Down on the road he made her sit, feet out, on the floor of the car while he produced a first-aid kit, soaked a bandage at a handy spring and bound her ankle firmly over her shoe. His verdict was that a break would have puffed less. 'But you'll have to have an X-ray in the morning,' he said. Before they set out he insisted she take a dram of brandy from the lid-cup of his flask. It was warming; it made her sleepy and dulled the pain of her ankle. Ross made no conversation; she remembered hoping that his silence wasn't all disapproval; then she knew no more until the changed rhythm of the car woke her with a start. 'But this is the quay. Your house—' she said bemusedly. 'Yes.' Ross switched off. 'I judged you wouldn't feel like going back to the kind of melee there'll be at the Park and I didn't care for delivering you at your flat until I'd made sure Shelagh would be there to take you in. So I brought you along here. If Morag is up she can make you some coffee. If not, I'll make it myself. Then I'll ring the Park, find out what goes on, and get Shelagh to leave in time to be home before you. Now—' The 'Now' meant that Loraine was to be lifted again and carried indoors. Inside there was silence. Morag had evidently gone to bed, and no wonder - the time was after one o'clock. Ross shouldered open the door of his sitting- room and put Loraine down on a chair with a foot-rest. 'I'll organize some coffee,' he said, and left her. She had been alone for about five minutes when the telephone rang and he called through from the kitchen, 'Answer that, will you? The thing is right at your elbow.'

It was. She lifted the receiver and a woman's voice came through. 'Ross? Are you there? Is that you—?' Cleone Lord! Ringing from England? Or from where? Taken aback, Loraine was momentarily dumb and Cleone had to ask again, 'Is that you, Ross?' before she managed, 'No. But Ro—- Mr. Frere is just here,' and Cleone cut in, 'Then who is speaking? Who are you?' "'Loraine Starr.' 'Re-ally?' The drawled word conveyed a world of surprise that Loraine should be answering Ross's telephone in the small hours, and Loraine seethed at the insult she inferred from it. But Ross had come through. He set down a tray and took the receiver from her. 'Who?' he asked. 'Miss Lord.' 'Oh, Cleone? Why, where are you?' he asked of the mouthpiece. 'At the Park. I finished early in London and caught the afternoon flight to Cork. I expected I should find you here. Are you coming over?' Though the voice came distortedly to Loraine she was so close to the instrument that she could not help hearing every word. Ross said, 'No, I'm afraid not again tonight.' 'Not? Why not? There's quite a crowd here, back from this wildgoose chase you've all been on. Why aren't you coming? You can hardly claim you're too busy at this time of - of the morning! Or can you?' Ross said evenly, 'In fact, yes. I've a responsibility on my hands. You'll remember I told you Loraine Starr and I were trying our luck together? Well, we chased some rather wilder geese than was wise. Result - Loraine has sprained her ankle and I'm keeping her here until

I've confirmed that her flat-mate will be back before I deliver her there.' 'I - see.' Again that pregnant drawl. 'What a pity for her! And for you - at such an hour! But of course you have your old beldame there what's her name, Morag? - haven't you?' Ross laughed on a short breath. 'Nominally, yes, though I've made the coffee myself. By the way, perhaps you can help me. Do you happen to have seen young Shelagh Maille around in the crowd you say is there?' 'Tch! Ross, really! You don't expect me to go hunting in this rout for my own little counterhand? That is the girl you mean, I take it? That zany child I took over from you? Anyway, why on earth should she be here? At Clonfert? She's hardly—' 'Because,' Ross cut in, 'she and her boy-friend were ahead of Loraine and me on the hunt, and by every likelihood they'd have got back before us. But forget it, Cleone. I'll ring myself.' 'And you're still adamant that you're not coming over? I'm not staying here tonight, you know. I only came out, expecting you might be here. I'm booked in at the Metro- pole and I sent away my taxi, thinking you might want to— But of course, you've other fish to fry, haven't you, and it is very late. So—' 'So,' Ross took her up, 'if you're prepared to wait for some time, I'll call for you. Meanwhile, I'm going to hang up now, do you mind? I'd rather like to track down Shelagh Maille as soon as I can. Loraine is pretty tired.' 'I'm sure!' murmured Cleone. They rang off.

The ill-starred night seemed to telescope after that. Ross poured coffee and telephoned while he drank his. He had Shelagh found and brought to the phone, cut short the news which bubbled from her that, believe it or not, she and Donal had won the treasure, a transistor radio for him, a beauty-kit for her - told her about Loraine and extracted her willing promise that she would leave for the flat straight away. 'Then when you're ready—?' he told Loraine, and though he said and did nothing to hurry her she felt hustled, ('a responsibility on my hands ...') and though on the way to the flat he remarked, 'You must find out from Shelagh where we went wrong,' when they arrived he merely enjoined Shelagh to take Loraine to the doctor's in the morning and left her in Shelagh's care. While Shelagh renewed the cold pack on the ankle and helped Loraine to bed she was full of her success in the hunt. 'Arrah, Petticoat Loose - nothing to that one,' she disparaged. 'It was as plain as the nose on your face. There were two or three other couples at the corrie at about the same time we were. But it was the last clue that foxed them. I don't know where any of them got to after that, for not a soul showed up at the last point which gave Donal and me the treasure.' Loraine said, 'Well, it certainly foxed us. I persuaded Ross Frere and I was pretty sure I was right - that it meant Tom O' th' Crag's cairn up on Slieve Cooneragh, but—' 'Slieve Cooneragh!' squealed Shelagh. 'You took the poor man right out there? Why not clear out to Shannon, while you were about it? My dear gossoon, it meant the Metalman again! "Once seen" - that is, you'd been sent to him before and were meant to double back to him again. Which Donal and I did, and won.'

'Oh!' Loraine digested this reasoning. 'And I suppose that bit about being blind and deaf and standing high could apply to him equally as to poor old Tom.' 'It certainly could. Slieve Conneragh indeed!' scoffed Shelagh. 'No wonder everyone else was back hours before you.' 'All right, you needn't rub it in. Anyway—' Loraine cocked a sly glance at her friend - 'who solved it as the Metalman? You or Donal?' Shelagh could almost be seen wrestling with her conscience. Conscience won. 'Well, actually Donald,' she allowed. But she had the last word. 'And why wouldn't he?' she demanded darkly. 'Him with all the experience he claims to have of treasure-hunts the length and breadth of Kerry or somewhere. And not alone on them either!'

The doctor's verdict on Loraine's ankle was that as the X-ray showed no bone to be broken she could get about as usual if she kept it strapped and used a stick for walking. By the time she was free and had bought a walking-stick it was late morning, so she decided to lunch in the city and return to her office in the afternoon. It was a popular hour for luncheon. The restaurant of the department store she chose was crowded, and the neighbour she would least have chosen was lunching at a table very close to her own. Cleone Lord, ordering coffee, acknowledged her with a nod and then spoke. 'Haven't you made a quick recovery!' she marvelled silkily. 'I'd pictured you laid out on a bed of pain, and from Ross's flurry about you last night I'm sure he expected the same.'

Loraine said evenly, 'If he ever did, he doesn't now. I've phoned him to report that I've been given the green light by the doctor and that I shall be back at work after lunch. Nowadays they encourage people not to lie up with sprains, you know.' 'Yes, so I've heard. So it was only a sprain? How glad you must be! Quite a little storm in a teacup, Ross's worry for you! And such a fiasco for you - your trailing him all those miles on a fool's errand ! I heard all about it from him. But, my dear, you couldn't really have thought the organizers of the hunt would have sent anyone the distance Ross said you went?' 'Well, I did doubt it, and of course I know now I was wrong. But at the time I couldn't read any other meaning into the clue,' Loraine admitted. 'Or maybe you didn't particularly want to read anything different into it?' Loraine made a show of consulting her menu-card. 'I wanted to be right about it - who wouldn't?' she queried. 'Who indeed? Unless of course you decided to angle for an extra hour or so of Ross's company by claiming to be right when you must have been pretty sure you were wrong?' The menu-card shook slightly in Loraine's grasp. 'Did - Mr. Frere suggest I did that?' 'Ross? Goodness, no. Even if he had his doubts, he'd be far too gallant. No - just my own idea of the kind of wile I mightn't be above myself if I were that bit desperate enough for a man's attention. After all, you had Ross captive, and if he didn't guess what you were up to, who was to blame you? Certainly not I—' As Cleone stood, beckoning her waitress and collecting her bag and gloves, her smile

implied she and Loraine were sharing a joke at the expense of the other sex. She added, 'If our timing had been a little better, I could have offered you a lift back to the quay. As it is, I'm afraid I must rush—' Loraine said, Thank you, but I can easily walk when I'm ready. My doctor says walking will do my ankle no harm.' If it had been possible to snarl all that, she felt she might have done so.

It did nothing for her mood to find Julian in her office and to have to explain why she was limping in answer to his greeting of 'Hey, what's with you, darling? Been hopping round the Metalman with a shade too much hopeful gusto - no?' 'I didn't know you were back,' she told him. 'I lighted in from Waterville just before lunch.' 'Did you get some good fishing?' 'So-so. We did quite a bit of sailing too and there was rather a dish of an American girl at the hotel. We went around together a lot.' 'And—?' 'What do you mean - "And"? You ought to be jealous!' 'Ought I?' 'Well, aren't you? Or at least a bit curious as to the type I console myself with when I'm away from you?' Loraine shook her head. 'I'm not jealous and I'm not curious.' She pushed papers about on her desk, wondering that he could be so

obtuse or so vain as to believe she still cared. She went on, 'Look, Julian, I'm rather busy. Would you mind telling me What this visit is in aid of? And don't say you've been burning the midnight oil on holiday, getting on with the History. Nor that you couldn't wait to see me, for I doubt if I'll believe either.' 'So you won't? Then I won't bother. Anyway, of course I haven't done any more on the manuscript. In fact it's turning into a bit of a drag, if you must know.' Loraine had to hide her dismay. 'You mean you don't want to go on with it?' Julian hesitated. 'I've got to, if I want the money. And I want it. I came back to find my TV scripts have been turned down and I overspent badly on taking this girl about. I've got some debts— If I go to Father he'll only cock his thumb at the Mill and tell me there's money to be earned there if I choose. I know. I've had some of that from him before. So the rough idea I had was that we might sidestep those daft conditions that Ross Frere made. After all, if you tell him I rate another cheque about now for the next section you've passed O.K., how is he to know whether I've written it yet or not?' 'In other words you want me to lie to Ross about it?' Loraine asked coldly. "There's no call to be crude. Let's face it, I shall be writing the stuff sometime or other, shan't I?' 'If the whole thing is dying on you, how can I bank on that? And suspecting you may not go on with it, I'd be getting money from Ross on false pretences.'

Julian's lower lip thrust forward like a sulky child's. 'Aw, phooey!' he scoffed. 'How squeamish can you get? It would simply be an advance on account. What's wrong with that?' 'No. That's final. You'll get another cheque when I've really O.K.'d some more of the book.' Loraine paused, 'How much are you in debt?' 'Not that you care - but seventy-five would see me through. Or a hundred would put me on easy street for the moment.' 'A hundred pounds?' Julian Shrugged. 'Well, you did ask.' 'Yes.' (Anything, thought Loraine, to keep him from going direct to Ross, cap in hand, for the manuscript which had already had more of the latter's charity than she liked.) So - 'I could let you have seventyfive,' she told Julian. 'You could? Well, there's a thing! Mention one's need, casual-like, and up pops Madame Croesus! Seriously, though - without hurting yourself? Just like that?' His eye brightened. 'More or less. I'd earmarked it for a holiday this year. Shelagh and I had talked about a trip to Paris. But now she isn't due for any leave from her new job, I probably shan't take any either. I could write you a cheque. The money is still in my current account.' As she wrote the cheque she was thinking that if anyone had offered her money with as little grace as she heard in her own voice, she would have thrown it at them. But Julian had no such scruples. He thanked her, took the Cheque and waved it before his face to dry the ink.

'You know, you fox me,' he said. 'One of your hands is the original frozen mitt, while the other writes a cheque! So either you've still got quite a yen for me - which you pretend to deny - or you can afford to be magnanimous because you've found someone else. I ask myself which? And to the second question - who?' 'The possibility not occurring to you, I suppose, that it could be neither?' Loraine returned coldly. 'That you need money which I can do without at the moment - that the reason for its changing hands could be as simple as that?' He wrinkled his nose at her. 'Very, very diplomatically put, darling! I really can't fault it. You aren't casting me off beyond recall, and if you have another iron in the fire you aren't putting a name to it until you're sure it's hot! All right, I won't press the point. Meanwhile, thanks without strings for this. You'll get it back.' Still using the cheque like a fan, he sauntered towards the door which, as he reached it, opened to an incomer - Ross - and to the caprice of a draught from the corridor which flicked the cheque from his grasp. 'Sorry. My fault.' As Ross stooped to retrieve it, Loraine was aware that his involuntary glance had almost certainly read it. Evidently Julian thought so too, for he took it back with a conspiratorial laugh. 'Oh dear, it does look bad, doesn't it? 'Pay the unworthy Julian Trent the sum of ... Signed, Loraine Starr. I mean, simply not done, is it? But not to worry - it's all so innocent. That's the blessing of the equality of the sexes. When you're going steady you can both contribute your whack without anyone's looking down their noses. The bottom drawer gone dutch, so to speak—'

He went out, leaving Loraine speechless at the effrontery of the false impression which, for some reason best known to himself, he had studiedly left behind. And there was nothing she could do to correct it! She was in no doubt at all that Ross had read the cheque. But if she made heavy weather of explaining that it was not in fact her contribution to their joint savings for marriage which Julian had claimed Ross could well snub her with the retort that money changing hands between her and Julian was no affair of his. She was equally reluctant to have him suppose she was in the habit of making loans to Julian. Stifled by Julian's malice, she saw no way out unless Ross helped her with some comment which dismissed the incident as of no importance. But he made no comment nor asked any questions. So that whether or not he had believed Julian she was never going to know.

CHAPTER SEVEN WHEN ROSS next returned from England he brought with him a proposition which, short of complete failure for Lairge Crystal, was the one threat which Loraine had always dreaded. During her own people's regime it had never been mooted. But it had loomed more than once under Simon Clay's, and now at Ross Frere's hands it again had a shape and a reality to be resisted with all the scant influence she had. His mention of it was casual. 'By the way, I've been approached by Lustre Facet with a view to a merger with us. What would be your views on the idea?' So it had come! Needing time, Loraine echoed, 'Lustre Facet? The the Midland firm?' Ross nodded. 'With a Royal Warrant. Worthy enough competitors. How would you view them as partners?' She remembered that he had listened to her in the matter of abandoning colour to specialize in pure lead crystal and took heart that he might listen now. 'Are you consulting me?' she asked. 'Let's say testing your initial reactions, shall we?' 'However violent?' she challenged. 'Fire away.' 'Then - No. A thousand times no. Over my dead body!' 'Why not? I'm entitled to six good reasons.'

She spread her hands emptily. 'Oh, there needn't be six. One ought to be enough. Because we're Lairge Crystal, that's why not.' He laughed shortly. 'My dear girl, that's sentimentality, not practical politics, and you know it.' 'Then I'll be practical,' she returned desperately. 'Our name is known all over the world. So is theirs. But our methods are quite different—' 'We call on precisely the same raw materials.' 'But not in the same proportions. Every crystal works' batch is made to a formula that's secret. And there are other secrets too.' 'We could still keep ours. And our name. Partnership for mutual gain doesn't have to mean strangulation for one of the partners.' 'But how often it does! You must have seen it happen. Firms joining up on "equal" terms, and the lesser one can be sunk without trace in a matter of months. And you - you are actually considering that for Lairge Crystal. How — how can you—?' Because she longed to say 'How dare you?' and knew she must not she broke off, her voice shaking, out of control. There was a long moment of silence. Then Ross stood and came round his desk to stand over her. He put a forefinger beneath her obstinately lowered chin. 'You're crying,' he said, stating it as a fact. 'I'm not!' 'And I didn't know you could.' Very deliberately, with the folded handkerchief from his breast pocket he dried the single tear on her right cheek, the one on her left, and returned to his chair. He went on,

'I've had hostility, wounded pride, self-pity and obstruction from you. But never tears until now. Has this hurt more than anything yet?' 'The - the shock has. I shall get over it, I daresay,' she said stonily. 'You don't have to accept it while it's still not a fact. But wouldn't the possible alternative — of closure for us — be even harder to take?' Shocked beyond tears now, she stared at him. 'But we've been doing better for months! We've lost hardly any labour, and sales are up and export figures too.' 'You'd expect them to be in the summer, on the crest of the orders for the Christmas trade. But we're not nearly competitive enough as to price.' 'Oh, price! Lairge Crystal has always stood for quality.' Ross snapped, 'That's cloud-cuckoo thinking that I don't expect from you. I'm not suggesting we butcher quality for the sake of price. But we've got to be attractive with both if we're not to go to the wall. That's why I considered the Lustre Facet offer - to give us cover while we overhaul our production to the point Where we may be able to meet anyone's prices - and beat them.' Loraine nodded slowly. 'I see. So it's on - the merger?' 'Not yet. I've stalled on it for a time. But if we do go it alone, we're going to have to streamline our methods considerably.' 'You mean - efficiency experts called in, "time and motion" study and all that? For craftsmen?' Ross compressed his lips. 'I wish you wouldn't jump to conclusions. I've no intention of putting a time-check on any craftsman - or woman — in the place. But there are still corners we must cut. For

instance, in the routine stuff of getting a consignment moved through from chair to despatch. What's our average time for that at the moment?' Loraine told him. 'But we can push through special orders much faster if we have to,' she added. 'Then I propose to look into how we do it for the urgencies when we can't for the average order. All right. Are those the letters for me to sign? I'll do them now.' He signed rapidly and handed the sheaf back to her. 'Not, I'm sure, that I need mention it, but you understand that the Lustre Facet offer is strictly confidential?' he said. 'Of course.' 'Good. As long as you know.'

Ross lost no time about his 'looking into'. The drive for better production went smoothly into gear and over the summer weeks began to show results. He spent nearly as much time on the glass floor as at his desk, watching, advising and checking and in the process, earning the slowly yielded respect of people whose skills he respected in his turn. Loraine warmed to the first man she heard refer to Ross as 'Himself' - that highest tribute of Irish regard for the head of anything from a family to a Corporation. Her father and her grandfather in their day had been 'Himself to Lairge Crystal; as her mother had been 'Herself', and as Simon Clay had never been anything but 'Mr. Clay' to his face and 'that one' or 'that feller' behind his back.

Ross cut prices to a cautious degree and stepped up his advertising. Their production was keeping pace with increased orders, and to Loraine's relief Ross did not mention the threat of the Lustre Facet merger again. If he finally turned it down, he would surely tell her. Meanwhile it seemed she was free to forget it, which she almost did until the morning when it ricocheted with a vengeance. When she went in to Ross's office at his summons she had the uncanny feeling that they were playing an earlier scene again. As on that other morning in the spring, the daily papers lay before Ross; as then, the topmost the Lairge Times, and just as then, he turned it to enable her to read the front page headline 'English Firm Bids For Lairge Crystal'; a lesser one - 'City's traditional craft to lose its identity?' and a column of critical speculation under the by-line 'Julian Trent'. Ross waited while she read it. Then, the dangerous pressure of his anger undisguised, he said, 'Well, your doing, I take it? What have you to say?' 'Mine? No!' 'Are you sure? The truth, please.' Her head went up proudly. 'Of course I'm sure. I don't lie. If you don't believe me, you should ask Julian.' 'Do you suppose I haven't already? I rang his editor at once, only to meet the usual journalistic stonewalling, "We never reveal our sources", and from Julian himself the impudent advice that I should look close to home.' 'And you concluded that meant me?'

'I didn't want to believe it, and if you deny it I'll take your word. Also, the relationship between you two being what it is, I found it difficult to credit that he would implicate you even with a hint like that. But "close to home"? Acting on that, where else could I look but at you? Because you realize, don't you, that on this side of the Irish Sea you and I were the only people who knew the bid was ever made?' Loraine nodded. 'I understood as much when you made it confidential, and I've mentioned it to no one.' 'You're sure of that? Think—' 'I don't need to think. Julian must have been joking. He didn't get the story from me, directly or by any side wind. It must have come from England.' 'Straight to an Irish local daily and nowhere else? Is that likely? No, Julian and the Times must have got it on this side of the water. And I daresay, apart from the breach of confidence with Lustre Facet, I needn't tell you of the harm such a rumour could do to us at this stage of our building up?' 'But you'll publicly deny it, won't you?' asked Loraine. 'Of course. At once.' She caught hopefully at the implication of that. "Then it really isn't on? It - isn't going to be?' Ross smiled, though grimly. 'After this, to borrow your own phrase, "over my dead body". I know a challenge when I see one and this leakage is it. From here out we go on alone - or go bust.' Loraine glowed. 'We shan't go bust now,' she said.

'Huh! Don't be too sure of that. Our prestige in the trade and with our own people - afraid of losing their jobs-will have taken such a knock that if we were a public company, our shares would be hitting bottom on the stock market this morning.' 'But we're not a public company. We're Lairge Crystal, and you—' But there she stopped, afraid lest, in expressing her loyalty and faith in him, she might choose words that would betray the love he had never asked of her. He waited a moment to allow her to go on, then he reached for the telephone. 'Denial coming up!' he said, and smiled, warming her heart.

For a time rumour and denial fought it out, with disbelief in both about equal. There were mutterings of unrest on the glass floors and for a few weeks the order-books reflected the setback in confidence which Ross had foreseen. But gradually other news, other gossip took over and - 'Well, glory be, if it isn't Himself that's forever at telling us our jobs are as safe as the Bank of Ireland, then it's Miss Loraine on the same tack. And if the daughter of her dear mother and her da before her isn't to be trusted, who is?' - So Lairge Crystal began to belittle its own fears to the point where any remaining fainthearts in the ranks scarcely dared to open their mouths. Only for Loraine the rankling mystery of the leakage itself remained. Of course she had lost no time in tackling Julian, though only to meet with the same obstruction as had Ross. Julian had laughed, 'Oh no, Loraine dear, my lips are sealed. The honour of a journalist and all that, you know. Besides, I did give Frere a clue. I told him he hadn't far to look for my informant.' 'Which led him straight to me,' Loraine had said dryly.

She had been puzzled by Julian's frown. 'To you? Then you knew this merger thing was in the wind?' he queried. 'Yes, confidentially. Ross Frere told me he and I were the only people over here who did know.' 'So when I broke the story, he accused you of selling out to me? Well, you can't blame me for that, considering I hadn't a clue you were in on it. But "close to home", I told him, didn't I? Yes, I see his point - from that he could have supposed it was you I meant. So now shall I play peacemaker and tell him you're as innocent as driven snow?' 'You needn't bother. He accepted my word that I'd had no hand in it.' 'Now isn't that nice?' Julian had scoffed. 'All cosy again in the inner sanctum and that reprobate Julian consigned to the doghouse as usual! However, hand on heart, I had no idea your fair name would be sullied by the hint I gave Frere. I supposed he was bright enough to get the message to look in quite another direction.' 'Where, then?' Loraine had demanded bluntly. But Julian had playfully covered his mouth. 'Ah no - me dumb monkey from now on,' he grinned. 'Let the great man have another guess. You too. Put your heads together. Have fun—!' Upon which taunt she had let him go and had contrived to avoid him since. But his shabby innuendo remained to nag and fret and nettle her mind. For he wasn't clairvoyant; someone had prattled to him without caring what use he made of the gossip. But who? 'Close to home'. Close to Ross .. . Not Loraine herself. Morag Doul? No, Ross would not talk to her. Anyone at all in Lairge Crystal? But if so, Julian

would not have been sure that Ross would know exactly where to look. Then - closer than anyone else to Ross - Cleone Lord? Cleone with whom Julian had every opportunity to gossip on her frequent visits to his home. But at the thought Loraine's every sense protested. For if Ross had confided in Cleone, then he had lied when he had told Loraine that only he and she knew of the merger project. Worse still, he had accused her out of hand, though aware that Cleone might equally be guilty of the leakage to Julian. And that her faith in Ross could not must not believe. For surely he would not have shielded Cleone at her, Loraine's expense? Or could he? Mightn't any man, supposing he cared enough for one woman and for another not at all? Short of the outside chance which might happen to prove or discredit Julian's hints as to his source, Loraine realized that she was never likely to learn the answer.

And yet, on a morning which was already crisp with a feeling of autumn, the cogs of that very chance were about to slip into gear. The occasion, though neither knew it, was Ross's belated notice of the fact that Loraine had taken no holiday. 'What do you mean, you don't want one?' he demanded. 'Just that.' She told him of her plans for a trip to Paris with Shelagh before Shelagh learned she wasn't due for leave from her new job. Loraine added, 'So I decided I wouldn't go away either this year. I'd just as soon carry on.

'That's nonsense. You must have a break of some sort. If not to Paris on your own, surely there's somewhere else you'd like to go?' 'Not really. Besides, it's getting rather late in the year.' ('Also I've lent the wherewithal for a holiday to Julian.' The things one couldn't say!) Ross retorted, 'You should have reminded me earlier. All right—!' his raised hand fended off the obvious reply - 'I ought to have realized you hadn't asked for one. My fault. However, even if I can't force you to take a holiday, I'll hunt you out of this for a few days or—' He broke off. 'Why what have I said?' Loraine's involuntary smile became a laugh. 'You're learning the language. "Hunt you out of this" is pure Irish,' she told him. 'Is it? Well, it happens to say exactly what I meant - that you're going away because I'm sending you. To London. And tomorrow. You'll be acting as Lairge Crystal's "man" at the Crystal Ware Exhibition where, as you know, we've got a stand.' 'At the Fine Crafts Centre? Yes, of course. But you're going there! I've booked your flight and your hotel.' 'Well, I'm not now. You are. You can use my seat- reservation and my - or no, we'll book you in somewhere else that should be handier for whatever shopping or shows you may want to do.' 'I thought I was supposed to be attending the Exhibition?' 'So you are. I'll brief you on that. But we'll have salesmen on the stand. Any important buyers will come by appointment and you need only show up for them. Say an hour or two each day. It's on for three days. You'll be away for five. You don't mind being on your own in London, I take it?'

Loraine said. 'No. I'll love it. I've been before alone. But the Exhibition! That scares me. Can I—?' Ross retorted, 'Sell Lairge Crystal's image to a few buyers? Well, I should hope so. As I recall, you buttered no parsnips about selling it to me!' 'But how do I know they'll listen to me? Anyway, they'll expect the big guns - you.' 'And that's good, considering it's only a matter of months since you dared me to claim I could possibly know the first thing about crystal! Don't I remember the comparisons of "soup" and "blancmange" being made between my particular know-how and yours? No, you put over that conviction of yours that there's no lead crystal made to touch ours for purity, and you'll do. I'll send some letters of introduction ahead of you, so that you needn't be lonely in the evenings unless you prefer it that way. Now go and get that air-ticket changed to your name, and I'll do the rest.' Unrecognized for what they were, the cogwheels were beginning to turn.

London ...! At less than twenty-four hours' notice Ross had laid on everything for Loraine's welcome. A chauffeured car met her at the airport; her hotel overlooked Green Park; there was a message at the desk asking her to ring a Mrs. Lionel Bruce at a Hampstead number when she arrived, and there were flowers in her room.

She freshened up in her private bathroom and rang the number, knowing Mrs. Bruce to be the wife of a partner in Ross's Birmingham firm. Mrs. Bruce sounded motherly and charming, telling Loraine she and her husband were also up for the Exhibition, staying with her sister, and they would be delighted if Loraine would join them for dinner at a West End hotel which She named. 'Eight o'clock, dear. Black tie, you know. Nothing formal. Just one or two other guests, but all glass people—' She broke off to laugh. 'Oh dear, doesn't that sound brittle? But you know what I mean, and my Lionel insists on talking shop, even at a party. You'll come, dear? That's good. We've heard so much about you from Ross. No, don't go there. Just say when you'll be ready and we'll collect you on our way.' We've heard so much about you from Ross. So many kindly words; the sort of thing people said when taking up an introduction. But as she dressed in a little silver- shot caftan and approved her mirror's reflection of shining hair and dark eyes and the shadowed cheekbones which Ross had once called 'fine', Loraine wondered just what he had originally said of her to the Bruces; whether he would say the same now. After that the evening was pure kaleidoscope. Mrs. Bruces's idea of 'one or two guests' was a milling crowd. The reserved dining-table occupied most of the width of the restaurant and the menu and winelist might well have graced a Lord Mayor's Banquet. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, but young people were conspicuously absent. Looking round the table Loraine judged she was the youngest person there. She herself had on her right side an elderly man, another colleague of Ross's, and on her left a fair-haired man of about Ross's age, introduced to her as a Geoffrey Gray without any other label and She to him (by Mrs. Bruce) as 'Loraine

Starr - Ross Frere's young genius from Lairge. The first glimpse of her he has allowed us. So make the most of her, G.G. She isn't over for long.' They exchanged small talk with each other and general talk across the table. Then, with a quizzical glance at her and breaking a small silence, Geoffrey Gray said: 'To think that you and I might have been on the same side by now! What one misses by the way the dice happen to fall!' Loraine's brow puckered. 'On the same side?' she prompted. 'Well— Oh, didn't you get me? I'm Gray - of Lustre Facet, you know. And don't please wither me by saying "So what?", even though I understand that was your verdict on our presumption at the time we were making covetous eyes at Lairge Crystal. Now I confess I'm really sorry the deal didn't go through. Because I've an idea you and I would have got along fine as colleagues.' Loraine flushed. 'I'm sorry. I hadn't realized who you were,' she told him. 'But really you're quite wrong in thinking that anything I said about - about your firm or about the merger carried all that weight with Mr. Frere.' 'No? Well, all I know is that one of the reasons he gave for finally turning us down was that the distaff side of the management - by which he must have meant you - wouldn't hear of the scheme. He quoted you. "Over my dead body" is what you are supposed to have said.' 'Oh, that—!' Embarrassed, she laughed. 'Well, he did ask me what I thought. But I'm not in the management of Lairge Crystal. I never was officially, and it belongs wholly to Mr. Frere now.'

Geoffrey Gray looked puzzled. 'I understood it had been in your family for generations?' 'It was - since the seventeenth century.' 'So I was sure I had heard. Lustre Facet, with only eighty years or so behind it, is a mere upstart by comparison. We should have taken pride in a link with you. And I must say I'd supposed you or someone of your family were still co-owners of Lairge Crystal with Ross Frere. For instance, I've never quite believed that Cleone - Cleone Lord, the designer, you know - could know for certain that Frere had sole control of it without any family strings attached. She needed to think so, I suspected, because her own public image might suffer from her private relations with anyone less than the kingpin of any concern. But through Frere you'll have met Cleone, of course?' 'Yes. You know her too?' Loraine asked. Her companion shrugged. 'Not as well as your Chief does. I knew her before he did, and before she had set her sights above one small gown shop in a Birmingham arcade. But I haven't made the kingpin grade - I'm only a junior partner, still climbing the ladder. Now and then I can cajole her into a dinner-date, though the last time I saw her recently was - yes, about when we were angling for Lairge Crystal, when I bet her a flagon of Dior perfume - which I've had to deliver that the thing would go through.' He spoke so casually that clearly he had no conception of his words' vital import for Loraine and even her mind took time to grasp their significance. When it did - 'You - told Miss Lord there was a possibility of a merger?' she asked, needing a confirmation which she wondered if she would dare to believe, even if it-came.

It came. Geoffrey Gray nodded. 'And set myself back the price of the Dior bit of nonsense for my pains. Why?' 'Well, just that I'm a bit surprised you felt free to discuss a deal outside your own firm until it did become a fact.' He laughed. 'I declare, you're rapping me over the knuckles! But I wasn't exactly blabbing the thing to the national Press nor shouting it from the housetops, and I hadn't any pangs of conscience about mentioning it in passing to Cleone, considering that she was bound to hear it from Frere sooner or later.' "I don't think she did.' Loraine had difficulty in keeping a bubble of exultation from her voice. 'No? Oh well, it's all so much water under the bridge now, isn't it?' Unaware of what he had done for her, Geoffrey Gray went on, 'Which is rather where we came in - that I wish it had jelled after all, as it might have been a stimulating experience, to judge by that rocket you were ready to give me just now!' They laughed and the subject was changed. Loraine's partner on her other side engaged her attention and later she joined him and his wife for coffee. Just before the evening broke up Geoffrey Gray sought her out again to ask if he could call for her to take her to the Centre the next morning and to suggest dinner a deux in the evening. But the Bruces had already claimed her for the former and wanted to send her to the cinema with their niece and nephew at night. Loraine told Gray, 'I'm awfully sorry—' and he quipped, 'D'you know*, I've always had phenomenal luck at cards!' But the raillery meant nothing and she knew he did not intend it to. For herself, she parted from him without regret, though the turn of the wheel of chance that had given him to her as a dinner companion had served her better than he could know.

For Ross had not lied to her! Nor accused her in order to shield Cleone. He had scorned the idea of the leakage having been on the other side. Yet it had. Unsuspected by Ross, Gray's careless boasting had given the news to Cleone, and Loraine had little doubt that Cleone's gossip had passed it on to Julian. Julian had meant his 'close to home' to point to Cleone. That was why he had been surprised that Ross had not understood the hint. And though it had implied 'close to' Ross himself, even that could not entirely damp Loraine's satisfaction at having learned the truth. Yet why had Cleone talked? In the business world in which she moved she must have known of the unwritten law against such a breach of confidence, however little Geoffrey Gray had made of the news. Then why? Could she have been piqued that she had had to hear it from him, not from Ross? Or had she wanted Julian to suppose Ross had no secrets from her? But neither seemed adequate reasons and Loraine realized she did not much care why. To be free of her doubts of Ross and to know herself vindicated was enough for her and it was far beneath her pride to steal an advantage by accusing Cleone to Ross. Let it go. As Gray had said, it was all water under the bridge now and could be forgotten.

She was able to occupy the next three days to the full. On the Lairge Crystal stand she was shy of her first buyer, but sheer enthusiasm carried her through and she took a large order from him, and though she sold nothing to the next man, she felt she may have broken ground with him. She suspected that the regular salesmen were being kind to her and letting her have the 'easy sells', but between them the order-books began to look healthy and their private

spies reported from time to time that they were more than holding their own against the English competition. Loraine shared her picnic lunch with the men and stood in for them on the periodic jaunts to the bar or for cups of tea-with which they punctuated the day. From each of such expeditions they came back well primed with the latest trade gossip. And when Loraine teased them that they were worse than a lot of old biddies nattering over their half-doors they retorted loftily that they were merely taking a decent human interest in the way their world wagged and that, come to mention it, they hadn't noticed any particular reluctance on her part to hear any tit-bits they had gathered while on safari to the bar. At which she had to laugh and give them best. And so became party to more speculation and wild surmise and wishful thinking masquerading as rockfast fact than any comparable group of her own sex would lend tongue or ear to, she told the men. Though Geoffrey Gray waved to her from the Lustre Facet stand she did not see him again to speak to. But the busy gossipmongers saw to it that she heard more of him. She knew him, did she? Ah, only through sitting next to him at dinner? Still, would she like them to hunt him over for a chat? No? Ah well, she wasn't missing much. It was said he didn't count for all that in his firm and in the gossips' joint opinion he hadn't the cut of a feller who would ever set fire to the Thames, let alone the far superior River Liffey... Not that he need worry. For hadn't his father the shrewd eye for the money? Galled himself a business promoter, old man Gray. Put up the cash to push other people's ventures; knew what he was at and took a nice rake-off when they succeeded. For instance, it was his

backing that had launched Cleone Lord, and look where that one had got herself now! Though however that might please his da, maybe son Geoffrey wasn't so happy about it, the way she had swept above and beyond him on the spring-tide of her luck. And he with his heart still scalding for her, while she had her eye turned - well now, did any man of them need to be mentioning where? Fascinated against her will, Loraine heard them out. To them it was just a vignette which they relished giving her, knowing nothing of the knife which it twisted in her own heart. How little indeed she needed telling where Cleone had turned now and who was turning to her! Old Morag's resentment of Cleone knew. Geoffrey Gray's dry cynicism knew. The brash world of the salesmen knew. In a dozen subtle ways Cleone herself implied it. Even Julian knew. What hope then that it wasn't true? That Ross—? But at that point in her thoughts and as if she could escape their turmoil by physically running, she picked up her bag and told the salesmen she was leaving. It was the last day of the exhibition and though it wouldn't close for another hour or two Ross had said she could come and go as she pleased and she had had enough of it. The Bruces had already left for Birmingham, so she had nothing planned for the evening. So - bath, dinner and bed? But seeing in the evening paper that Swan Lake was being danced at Covent Garden, she rang the box-office and got a sidestall booking which someone had cancelled. She was changing when her bedside telephone rang. The receptiondesk switched through the call and Ross came on the line. 'Loraine?' Why, yes. Where are you?'

In London. At the Centre.' 'Oh—You hadn't said you were coming over. I left the Centre at about four. Would you like me to come back?' She hoped he would say Yes, but he said No. 'It's not worth your trouble. I've just looked in for the last hour, but we'll be closing shortly and business is non-existent. Have you enjoyed yourself?' She stifled her disappointment at having missed him. 'Immensely,' she said. 'I'm glad. I must say you and the boys have done a pretty good job between you. What are you doing this evening? I ask, because I'm not free to join you. Cleone has booked me for her London salon's anniversary party, so I hope you've got something laid on for yourself?' She was glad she could say yes with truth. 'I'm going to the ballet at Covent Garden,' she told him. 'You are? Good.' Concluding, to her pride's relief, that she would not be going alone, he said, 'We shall be on the same flight back tomorrow, so don't go to the Air Terminal. I'll call for you by car at, let's see—?' She suggested a time to which he agreed. Then, forestalling his ringing off, she said, 'I do want to thank you for all this - sending me over to the Exhibition and to this hotel. And for - the flowers and the introductions. I've never been made to feel quite such a V.I.P. before.' 'No?' he countered lightly. 'Well, perhaps you've never before been cast as an ambassadress or a First Lady, either of whom rates the plushiest treatment, didn't you know?'

'You mean I got it - the plush - for being an ambassadress - sort of?' she asked, pleased. 'You're too modest. Why not for your being Lairge Crystal's First Lady - sort of?' he mimicked her schoolgirl jargon. She caught her breath. 'Because I'm not—' But she spoke to silence. He had rung off.

The next day she was waiting for him in the hotel lounge when he came for her. But they were not to travel tête-à-tête to the airport. Cleone, exquisite in a yellow suede suit and a perched matching beret, made grudging room in the big hired car for Loraine, who supposed they would make an unwelcome threesome all the way to Cork. However, it proved that Cleone was bound for Paris on a flight scheduled to leave shortly before the Aer Lingus plane was due out. They went together to the reception lounge and when Cleone's flight was called Ross stood, prepared to escort her. 'Please, no!' she demurred. 'Your own might be called any minute.' "It's not due for a quarter of an hour.' 'All the same— Anyway, I wouldn't dream of cheating Loraine of your company. No, I insist, Ross. We part here.' With which she slung her handbag over her wrist, touched his lapels lightly with either hand and lifted her face in invitation. He looked down at her, smiled faintly, then kissed her on the lips. 'And now if you're ready?' he said. He took up her beauty-case, asked

Loraine to excuse him and ignoring Cleone's protests walked away with her to the gate for her flight. Where she will expect him to kiss her again. And he will, thought Loraine, and knew she mustn't let herself care.

CHAPTER EIGHT STRAWS in the wind ... A few weeks later Loraine was to blame herself for ignoring their drift when Shelagh's affairs seemed to blow up all at once - and disastrously. For instance, spendthrift though she was, somehow Shelagh always used to manage to get by without running into debt. But lately, though she kept her own counsel, the frequency of too many trade envelopes in her post pointed to their containing Accounts Rendered, and indeed one which Loraine opened by mistake showed it had been running for three or four months. Then there was Shelagh's growing reticence about her job. Questioned, however casually, as to how her day had gone, her reply would be a laconic, 'So-so,' or 'Fair enough.' No details. No anecdotes. Nor the acute mimicry of her more pretentious customers with which at first she had made Loraine laugh. No wild improbable plans and no absurd daydreams voiced aloud - as if the volatile mercury from which they bubbled had run out. There was also the occasion of a violent showdown with Donal Moore, when long-suffering, patient Donal banged out of the flat, declaring to Loraine that 'that one' - meaning Shelagh - could dam well count him out just as long as she wanted to measure a man by the kind of take-home money that would run to mink one week and a trip to Bermuda the next. To which Loraine had protested, 'Oh, Donal, that's just Shelagh being Shelagh! She's prodded you before like that and you've never never minded. Why now?' 'Because,' Donal said seriously, 'tonight she really meant it. Oh, I exaggerated the mink and Bermuda bit, but she meant all the rest of what she said. And so, may I be forgiven, did I. And don't try any peacemaking, please, Raine. Because if she has thoughts of marrying

me, she'll do it on the only terms I can offer her or not at all, as I've left her in no doubt.' 'You asked her to marry you, then?' 'She knows very well I want to!' 'But you asked her - in so many words - tonight?' pressed Loraine. 'I did not. Tonight we weren't asking each other anything. Just telling. She was in that kind of mood and drove me to the same—' With which Donal had gone on his way and Shelagh seemed willing enough to let him go. And then there was the morning when Loraine, visiting the cutting shop in the works, was transfixed at the sight of Shelagh at her old bench, intent on the wineglass rim she was cracking off, while the inept Bridie Ryan, who had taken her place when she left the job, stood by. 'Shelagh! What on earth—?' Loraine began. But Shelagh was adjusting the direction of her pencil of flame and it was Bridie who replied. 'Sure, she's after helping me out, Miss Loraine. Comes in and stands watching, and I all a'shake, the way I knew she was finding fault. So then she says, "Why, girl dear, you haven't a clue in the world, have you? Let you get up now and give me your place and I'll show you." Which is what she's at, Miss Loraine, and where's the harm in it at all?' Nonplussed, Loraine did not answer. She waited until, under Shelagh's deft direction, the surplus glass splintered from the rim into the discard bin. Then she barred Shelagh from taking another item from the feed-tray.

'Look, what goes on? Why aren't you at the shop? And what are you doing here?' she demanded. Shelagh said stonily, "This is my lunch-hour, as you should know. I wasn't feeling hungry, so I had a notion to look back here—' 'But how did you get in?' 'Well, I couldn't have clocked in, could I? I came by the office wing. Pat Byrne must have stepped out for something, for he wasn't on the door. I looked in at your room, but you weren't there. So I came on through and took over from Bridie. And not before time, if you ask me. Just be casting your eye at this - and this - rims hair-thin here and over a millimetre thick there! Prize throwouts, the both, and the dear knows how many more gone down the lehr already—' But there Shelagh broke off, turned then slid down from her stool as Ross appeared behind her shoulder. He looked from her to the shrinking Bridie and then at Loraine for explanation. She acknowledged his unspoken question. 'Exactly. That's what I'm trying to find out,' she told him. He said curtly, 'Well, don't you know? Aren't you conniving at it?' 'Conniving?' But he had turned to Shelagh. 'You must know you've no business here. How did you get in?' 'I had some scattered time, so I walked in.' ' "Scattered" time?' Loraine translated, 'That's Irish for time to spare.'

'I see.' He addressed Shelagh again. 'Then you'd better walk out again, hadn't you? Straight out!' Shelagh lingered. 'It was no fault of Loraine's. I did walk in - just like that - and she didn't know.' But Ross just looked through her, waited until she left, told Bridie to go on with her work and said to Loraine, 'When you're free, perhaps you'll come to my office?' When she joined him there he said without preliminary, 'Well, if you weren't aiding and abetting, what were you doing?' 'Being as surprised as you, and prepared to read the Riot Act if you hadn't,' she retorted. 'Then I misjudged you. I'm sorry. But for heaven's sake!' - his palm slammed his desk - 'what kind of set-up is this, if any Tom, Dick or Harry can stroll in and take over a machine at the drop of a hat? Are we in business, with unions and foremen and door-porters and clockin systems, or are we a do-it-yourself centre - all facilities and materials provided? Incidentally, where was the forewoman, that she allowed the girl in?' 'They take it in turn for tea-breaks on that floor. I don't think she was there.' Ross went on, 'Not to mention the small matter of industrial accidents risk. Have you asked yourself, for instance, where we should stand for liability if young Shelagh, off our payroll this six months, should have had an accident with that cutter?' Loraine said, 'I hadn't thought, though it would have been frightful. But I have thought that if you hadn't dismissed her quite so abruptly, she might have explained herself.'

'Oh, she might? While we hung on her every word? Anyway, how came she to be free at this hour? I thought she worked in Cleone's shop next door?' 'It was her lunchtime and somehow she bypassed Pat and came through the office block.' Loraine went on, 'She has been behaving rather oddly lately. Quarrelling with her boy-friend, for one thing—' 'Is that to behave oddly? Aren't quarrels some of the occupational hazards of either having or being a boyfriend?' Ross put in coolly. 'They needn't be. Not when the boy-friend is as loyal and faithful as Donal Moore is to Shelagh. Anyway, she's been so temperamental in other ways that are quite foreign to her that I've wondered—' 'Whether, on this morning's evidence, she would like her job back?' 'When she left, she was so discontented with it that I doubt that she does. No, I think she was just taken with the whim to show off to Bridie Ryan. But I've wondered whether she's half as happy or as - as fulfilled as she expected to be in her new job.' Loraine paused. 'Supposing she did want to come back to us, would you take her?' Ross said, 'As long as she wasn't doing a butterfly act - flitting from one discontent to another and back again - yes.' "Then would you see her and find out?' But he shook his head. 'No, I think you'd better handle her; discover what was really at the bottom of her gatecrashing. Meanwhile we're still left with Bridie Ryan as a problem. It's months since I gave her six weeks' grace. On your advice I kept her longer. But now she's a luxury we can't afford. Is there really no one we can promote instead and stand her down or let her go?'

'Nobody who comes anywhere near Shelagh's standards. Bridie did improve a lot too. It's only lately that she has slipped again.' 'More domestic friction, do you suppose?' 'I haven't asked her and I doubt if she would tell me. Especially if she suspected the question was loaded; you would get rid of her if she admitted to problems which might be solved by her staying at home.' Ross said feelingly, 'You know, it seems to me that any set-up with a proportion of your sex on its staff is asking for trouble if it doesn't employ a full-time psychiatrist as well! However, you've rapped me before now, haven't you, on the subject of people being people before they are automatons on a job?' Loraine flushed. "That was before I realized you didn't need "rapping". That you knew it all.' 'About women? What man ever does that?' 'No, about anyone. About how they'll respond to being trusted and believed in and - backed.' A moment of silence stretched out. Then, as if he understood they were not now talking about Shelagh or Bridie or 'anyone', but about Loraine herself, Ross said: 'You feel I've done all that for you, Loraine? But not consistently, surely?' She smiled faintly. 'No. But enough to make me feel sort of bulwarked ... whole again. And I'm very grateful.' He met her eye. 'So am I grateful,' he said. 'You? For what?'

He allowed his glance to slant away. 'Oh, let's say for certain lesser mercies, shall we?' he invited lightly. And then, 'Well, we'll leave Bridie where she is and think again when you've sounded Shelagh. You'll let me know the result?' She nodded Yes and left him. • That flippant 'grateful for lesser mercies' which had meant nothing! And that sudden switch to the prosaic! Before that Loraine thought they had drawn a little close. Like two people with hands outstretched across an abyss, almost touching. Then one of them had backed away, not wanting the contact. Or afraid of it? But what could Ross fear from her?

Her intention to tackle Shelagh that evening came to nothing, for by the time they met Shelagh was already on the crest of another change of mood. She was concerned lest Loraine had borne any blame for the incident of the morning, but she dismissed it with an airy 'Arrah, I must have been mad! Want the job back? And why would I, and I off to Dublin this very Thursday!' Loraine stared. 'To Dublin? Dear, how marvellous for you! What for?' 'To model, what else?' Shelagh savoured the triumph of that, then went on, 'At Miss Lord's Collection for the Dublin buyers and her private clients there. When I got back this afternoon Miss Calcott had had a letter from her, asking for me. I'm to go on Thursday and the Showing is on Friday. Oh, Raine, I can't wait! Miss C. was as dumb

as a mussel about the sort of things I might be modelling. But you do think, don't you, that this could be my first real break?' Loraine agreed, 'It could be. I'm so glad for you. But you are just going for this one show? You'll be coming back?' Shelagh pulled a face. 'On Saturday, worse luck. But as she thought of me this time Miss Lord could always want me again. She is really rather marvellous, you know, Raine. Because, whenever she's come to the boutique, she's never seemed to have an eye for me. But she must have been watching me all the while and I never guessing!' In this rapturous state she launched on the intensive grooming for which the Dublin trip called. She shampooed and manicured and experimented with make-up and demonstrated to Loraine and a long mirror the nonchalant stroll and provocative swirl-of-skirts turn she would be doing on the catwalk. On Thursday morning she-was blissfully excited, and Loraine saw her off on the Dublin train with misgivings only for the inevitable anti-climax of her return. In Friday's post there was a picture postcard of O'Connell Street under an improbable cobalt sky. Shelagh wrote that there was a rehearsal of the Collection on Friday morning; the Show was in the afternoon and there was to be a cocktail party at the Gresham Hotel in the evening to which the models were invited. 'I'm on my way, Raine. On my way. Super!' she concluded, and Loraine continued to be happy for her - until Friday night. Supper by the fire and an exciting play on television. Loraine had planned her evening and was enjoying it when she was startled to hear a key being used on the front door and Shelagh, hatless and wet from the soft drizzle that was falling, came in.

Loraine blinked with surprise. 'You - you're at a cocktail party at the Gresham!' she said stupidly. Shelagh threw aside the little pillbox cap which had perched so jauntily on her hair for her outward journey, and shrugged out of her coat. 'So I am. Whooping it up like crazy. Looks like it, doesn't it?' she said tartly. 'Then wasn't there a party after all? Anyway, I didn't expect you until tomorrow. What time did you leave Dublin? You'll want some supper now?' 'No. I could have had tea on the train, but I didn't want any. And there was a party, but I didn't stay for it. I— Oh, Raine, it was awful! I've never been so - so shamed in my life. They—' Shelagh broke off, her face crumpling like a hurt child's. Loraine said practically, 'You do need some supper. But if you'd rather tell me first?' As she spoke she sat down again and Shelagh followed slowly to crouch on the fireside stool. She knuckled her eyes fiercely. 'Just as well I had a compartment to myself, for I've had the water cart turned on most of the way. In between hating them all, and writhing with the shame of it. And asking why she had to pick on me - how she could? 'How who could - what? Miss Lord?' Loraine's heart sank. 'Who else? Hadn't she the whole thing planned when she sent for me? She said so!' Patiently - 'What whole thing?' Loraine asked. 'Why, this making a guy of me. This gimmick she had laid on to show off her wretched way-out clothes. Setting me up like an Aunt Sally at the Killorglin Puck Fair. And I, way over the top with delight

when she told me before the rehearsal that I was to go on first. Imagine! First — before any of the professional dolls! It just wasn't happening to me, I told myself until - she told me she wouldn't be wanting me to model any of the other clothes at all. Just this - and showed it to me and told the dresser to put me into it. And what do you think it was, Raine?' Loraine shook her head. 'It was—' Shelagh gulped on her humiliation, 'It was the red skirts and the tatty old man's waistcoat to button round me, and plaid shawl that's crossed and tied behind, and the extra petticoat for throwing over the head against the weather - the peasant stuff a decent Irish girl wouldn't be caught dead in these forty years, even in the West of Connemara or out on the Arans. There was even a - a creel for my back, and my feet and legs were to be bare as the day I was born. Raine, I could have died!' Loraine puzzled, 'But what was the point?' "Contrast," she said. Contrast between the colleen image and the swinging styles her collection and all the other big-name couturieres were bringing to Ireland. "For a laugh", she said. To con the Irish into believing they're with it, even if not madly so yet. To hear her talk you'd think we were all still wearing woad, and I told her it wasn't on - that I couldn't,' Shelagh finished. 'And so?' Loraine invited. 'And so in the end I did it. The other models were all English and terrible upstage. But there was one nice one who asked me how I had ever dreamed I'd be chosen to model in any collection with no training at all and no experience. But she said, "Do you know what I'd do in your place, honey? I'd go to it. Do the colleen stuff for all you're worth. Hand them their laugh. Give them the works !" And

afterwards I'd be glad I did, if only because I hadn't broken the models' code that it isn't done to let a sponsor down.' Loraine said, 'I'm sure she was right. I'm glad you listened to her. And what happened?' 'Oh they got their laugh all right. I wore the whole wretched outfit and scragged my hair all over my face and gave them a bit of a reel for good measure before I came off. But I came away as soon as we were told we could go and - well, I've finished with them, Raine. I've had it - the lot.' 'I'd sleep on that if I were you,' advised Loraine. Shelagh shook her head. 'I don't need to. Besides blubbing, I thought a lot, coming down in the train. For one thing I can't manage on the boutique pay. Miss Calcott gets most of the commission that's going, and I've been getting into debt all round.' 'I was afraid you were. But don't worry, I'll sub you until you get straight.' Loraine took a long shot. 'That cracking-off caper of yours the other morning - was it really just impulse or were you hankering to be back on the job?' 'Only impulse then, showing off. But hankering now. Would the Chief have me, do you think?' 'He said so, if you wanted to come.' 'You asked him?' Shelagh looked down at her hands, surveyed their spread fingers, their palms and their backs. 'Funny,' she addressed them, 'the notion I had that everything else about me would be making my fortune for me, but not you. Not that you'll ever be buying me a Silver Cloud either, but I suppose that's the way it goes.'

She rose stiffly and wearily and Loraine said firmly, 'Now you are going to have some supper. Go and freshen up and I'll have it ready for you when you come back.' But as soon Shelagh had gone to her room Loraine went to the telephone. At the ringing sound - 'Donal?' she said softly. 'Speaking.' "Loraine here. Listen, Donal, if you could manage to come round now, I think Shelagh would be awfully glad to see you.' 'You're joking, of course.' Donal's tone was laconic. 'Never less so.' 'Then she has a whim to set me up and knock me down all over again. No, thanks. And if "that's what she's wanting, couldn't she be asking me herself, without making you her go-between?' Loraine said desperately, 'She has no idea I'm calling you. And she's taken too much of a knock of her own to be in any mood for baiting you. Do believe me, Donal - if ever she needed to know that you and I and anyone who loves her - are with her and behind her and rooting for her, she does now. Please!' 'Why, what's the matter? What's gone wrong with her?' 'I can't stay to tell you. She's just back from Dublin and I'm supposed to be getting her supper. But she'll tell you if you'll come. Will you?' 'You'll be at home too?'

Loraine guessed he was picturing a threesome in their communal sitting-room. 'By the time you can get here I'll have washed up and taken myself to bed with a good book,' she assured him. Silence. Then - 'I'm on my way,' said Donal.

Four weeks later, on the day after Shelagh had worked out her notice at the boutique, she and Donal announced their engagement, and though Donal decreed that they wouldn't marry until he was made foreman of his floor at the Flour Mills in six months' time, Shelagh accepted this edict without a murmur of protest. On the following Monday she was back at her own bench at Lairge Crystal, and the supplanted Bridie Ryan, offered a choice of jobs, chose to go to the packing department. Shelagh voiced her worry that, as Donal insisted they begin married life in a house, her giving up the flat would leave Loraine without a home. 'Unless you took it over from me?' she suggested as she had done once before. But Loraine, having no car, thought she would look for something nearer the city, and with six months' grace she ought to be able to find a place she liked, she assured Shelagh. Meanwhile she despaired of Julian's turning in any more of the History, as she had neither seen nor heard from him since his jaunty hints about the Lustre Facet leakage. She believed he would repay the loan she had made him, and at last he did. But when he came to the flat to do so, he brought also an armload of the Lairge Crystal records - old account books, payrolls, yellowing 'handwritten business letters - which had been the raw material of his research for the book.

He handed her his cheque. 'Many thanks. It filled a long-felt want,' he grinned, and answered her dismayed glance at his burden, 'All right, I know this lot amounts to the Grown Jewels in your eyes, but not to worry. I give you my word it's all there in good order, every tatty bit of it, which you may check at your leisure before you give me a receipt.' He dumped the bundle before her and topped it with the manuscript of the few chapters he had completed. She fingered the latter and looked up at him. 'You mean—?' He nodded. 'That I'm through. Sorry and all that, but I haven't much relished the police-stuff Frere laid on. The thing has been dying on me for some time. Also I'm now in the process of frying some far more valuable fish.' 'Such as?' 'All burned up with interest, aren't you? However - I'm taking over as Cleone Lord's P.R.O. I signed the contract when she was over last weekend and stayed with us.' 'P.R.O.? That means a publicity agent?' 'There's a clever girl!' Julian mocked. 'Yes, now she's launching out all over, she needs someone to handle her publicity, and I've got the job. Based on London, so you'll soon be well rid of me. Because that's what you want, isn't it? I'm in the way?' 'In the way? I don't know what you mean.' 'Now, now, don't play obtuse!' He wagged a finger at her. 'You know you've made it clear for months that you've no use for me.' 'Only,' Loraine said hardly, 'after you had shown you had very little use for me. Which was about a year ago. At the time my stepfather died.'

'Oh, that!' Julian stirred uncomfortably. 'Well, you must admit you rather asked for it. I mean, what man would choose to go around followed by fingers pointing at his girl?' 'I don't know about a man. I only know that a Trent of Clonfert Park felt he couldn't touch pitch without soiling his hands!' 'Well, you can't deny that there was at least the makings of pitch. But if I'd really let that matter for long, why d'you suppose I've hung around since, begging for ha'pence, when all I've had from you is kicks?' 'I don't know. Why have you?' she asked mechanically. 'Oh, be your age! Because you still had something for me, of course.' He looked her over. 'Still have - but let it pass. And perhaps because the male animal running true to form in the matter of jealousy - I sensed you had other aspirations, though it's taken Cleone to spell them out to me.' Loraine felt her spine chill. 'And Miss Lord thinks she knows what aspirations I have?' 'She claims to, and with reason, I think. For instance - the timing. Ross Frere comes on the scene about last February? Or March? He takes over. I get the cold shoulder about at the same date. Can't set a foot right, poor Julian! The two of you go into a dedicated clinch over the business and he's been seen to be the only eligible male you allow into your orbit all summer. And so - it figures, as I'll be writing snazzily when Cleone erupts on the American scene. As she says, after old Clay had banged one door shut in your face, could be you saw Ross opening another for you? As long as you work it right, you might land him and Lairge Crystal at one go. Could be? You hope!'

'Do I? Well, if anyone knows how little prospect I have of either, surely Miss Lord should?' (Keep it cool or you'll explode, Loraine adjured herself.) Julian nodded. 'Exactly. But being an interested party, she believes in having the competition accurately taped.' 'I'm surprised she admits there is any competition.' 'I doubt if she need fear any, romance-wise. But Frere's alliance with you in Lairge Crystal is such poison to her that it's my guess she may stall on accepting him until he's found some graceful way to get rid of you. She probably wouldn't grudge you a golden handshake. But to have you permanently around on the Lairge Crystal front, that she does not relish at all.' 'I - see. Well, thanks for putting me so far in the picture,' Loraine heard herself say. 'Think nothing of it. Call it a service for old times' sake.' Julian paused on his way to the door. 'Of course, if you wanted to fight on near-level terms, you could see that Frere heard it was Cleone who gave me the Lustre Facet scoop. Or do you suppose he knows that by now?' 'I don't know. We haven't discussed it.' 'Well, just an idea. After all, "All's fair—" and the rest.' Julian sketched a jaunty wave of farewell. 'Be seeing you!' He left Loraine feeling as if he had offered her a missing jigsaw piece and, using it, she had found that it fitted. For, possessed of the merger news, Cleone must have decided that the chance to cast suspicion of its leakage on her, Loraine, far outweighed the risk she ran in betraying it herself. Julian must have assured her that his journalist's

honour made her safe, and guessing rightly that Ross would confide only in Loraine, she had probably felt confident of the result which would follow the breaking of the story in print. Suspicion ... accusation . . . even dismissal. Cleone had gambled on all three, and Loraine looked, appalled, at the size and menace of such enmity; at the kind of weapon Cleone would stoop to use in order to be rid of her small influence with Ross. Cleone had failed this time. But would she, the next time she tried? Could Loraine hope that Ross's loyalty and faith in her would always be proof against an antagonism which looked as if it would despise no means to achieve its end? Though why Cleone, sure of so much of Ross, should resent the slender regard he had for her, was a jigsaw shape for which Loraine could find no place. Her eye caught the pile of record documents and Julian's unfinished manuscript. Tomorrow she would have to return the former to the Lairge Crystal safe and the latter, as it stood, had no value now. But as she leafed through its pages, deploring again how little historical ground Julian had so far covered, suddenly she had an idea. Supposing she postponed admitting to Ross that the project had failed; kept the precious archives by her for a while; cut Julian's manuscript by the amount she judged it needed, and then tried herself to speed up and continue the exciting, human- interest story of her family and Lairge Crystal over the last two hundred years? She did not know if she could do it, and realized it was not enough to be critical of Julian's efforts. But the more she thought of it, the more she longed to accept the challenge and try. At least she had heard it all told as a story and still carried a great deal of it in her head, and if

she could write it at all it would be done with all the love and belief in its worth which no one but she could bring to it. Sooner or later Ross would ask about it and she would have to admit that Julian had abandoned it. But by then she might have brought some shape to it herself. The prospect did something, if not much, to dull the threat of Cleone Lord's malice for which there seemed no cause.

CHAPTER NINE THAT week the golden autumn yielded suddenly to a mixed pattern of winter, to days of biting black frost which was apt to give way almost overnight to dank stillness and lowering fog over the river, or to gales which whipped its surface to choppiness and flung vicious, blinding spume across the quays. Too often the rain came too, beating in across the mountains to add its quota of dreariness to days which, only shortly before, had kept their brightness until sunset, but now were twilighted by early afternoon. At Lairge Crystal the pace slackened with the season. All the orders for the Christmas trade had been dispatched. The busyness was in the retail shops now and would not frenzy the glass floors again until the rush of 'repeats' and 'specials' began in December. During the first week of November Ross went to Europe for his English firm, and it was while he was away that Bridie Ryan came to Loraine to hand in her notice. Loraine was surprised. She hoped Bridie had settled down in the packing department and said as much. 'And I had so,' Bridie agreed. 'But it's himself - my man, d'you see. They've given him a rise in pay at the Flour Mills, and he'll not have me working any longer. Now he will have me stay home and care for him and the little ones, he says.' Loraine said, 'Well, we shall be sorry to lose you, Bridie. Dan has been against your working for a long time, hasn't he?' Bridie nodded. 'He's seen no need, ever since I took up again after the twins. He's a good man, thanks be, and he's given me all he could manage. But it's not the men who have to do the marketing and the mend, mend and the going-without, is it, Miss Loraine?'

'No,' Loraine agreed. 'Though I've never known how you've managed to work, having the twins. They don't even go to school yet, do they?' 'They do not. Sure, they're only just four. And you have the right of it - I couldn't leave them if we hadn't Dan's old mother with us to give them a bit of dinner till I'm home myself to get them their tea. Nor if it wasn't for my neighbour, Norah Cassidy, who's been glad of the bit I've been able to slip her to keep an eye on them, days—' Bridie broke off to clap a hand over her mouth. 'But you wouldn't be telling Dan now, would you, that Norah took money for it, the way he thinks she's a good- for-nothing and might abuse her so to her face?' Loraine, knowing Mrs. Cassidy for a kind of camp- follower to the bargees, privately agreed with Dan. But she reassured Bridie. And then, needing to prove her own surmise right, she asked, 'Tell me something. Those times when you weren't doing at all good work on the glass floor, did some of them possibly tie in with times when you and Dan were specially at odds about your working when he didn't want you to?' On Bridie the effect of the casual question was strange. She caught her breath sharply, her eyes shadowed and her hesitant, 'Dan and me at outs with each other? Well, so we were - often, and he fit be tied. But—' left Loraine with the impression that she was playing for time. Loraine prompted gently, 'I just wondered, that's all, whether, perhaps, you worked particularly poorly whenever you were worried about quarrelling with Dan, and then did better when things at home levelled out again. It could happen like that, I know, and it could explain why your work varied so much if it was that way with you.' Bridie appeared to ponder this theory. 'Could it?' she asked on a dubious note. 'With too much to worry you on your mind, I should think so.'

'You mean — the way I might be fretting and bothered about anything? This day about Dan being mad, or that day about something else?' Puzzled, Loraine said, 'Well, yes. For instance, supposing one of the twins was ill, or you weren't feeling up to the mark yourself anything. When I asked you about your differences with Dan I was only making a shot in the dark. Anyway, it doesn't matter now, does it? You're happy to leave and stay at home?' Bridie nodded. 'I am so, now there's to be more money coming in and himself wants me there. Thank you, Miss Loraine.' But she lingered. 'Supposing there was another thing nagging me besides Dan and me tearing two ways?' she volunteered. Loraine prepared to be confided in. 'Well, was there?' she asked. But it seemed Bridie had already regretted her question. 'And if there was itself, it'd need more boldness than I have to be telling it to you,' she evaded. Loraine gave up the quest. 'As long as it's over now?' she offered. Bridie shook her head. 'Over, is it? Sure, it's not over at all. Nor will be, till—' But there the 'boldness' she claimed to need failed her again and Loraine, mildly mystified but admitting deadlock, let her go.

In entrusting her publicity affairs to Julian it seemed that Cleone had chosen well. Within a week or two of his taking over he contrived to pepper both the English and the Irish papers with news and snippets of gossip about her. Cleone Lord ('meteoric Star of dress design') contributed to symposiums of opinion; graced a television panel; advised on beauty

culture in a glossy magazine; suffered a perfunctory burglary at her London apartment; was considering buying a racehorse; was not buying a racehorse; was photographed with friends; was about to burst on the American scene and - on a certain bleak day that Loraine was to remember all her life - Cleone was alleged to have told inquirers that her engagement might be announced before her imminent American debut - or it might not. Alongside this ambiguous news appeared a photograph of Cleone at dinner in a London restaurant 'with friends' among them, recognizably to Loraine, Ross and Geoffrey Gray, two other women and an elderly man whom she thought might be 'old man Gray' of the salesmen's gossip, Cleone's financial sponsor, Geoffrey Gray's father. Cleone sat at Ross's right hand and to Loraine's tortured fancy the implication of the gossip was clear. So fear had turned to certainty which had to be faced at last! As no doubt she would hear from Ross himself when he returned from England that noon. Fortunately she was spared discussing the story with Shelagh as the Irish paper which they shared at breakfast had not carried it. She saw it first in the London daily which arrived later at the office and she was able to read it alone. With the page still spread open before her she thought, 'I've got to know for certain! Before Ross tells me—' feeling that she needed the armour of a little time in which to concede the defeat of dreams which had never for a moment been hopes. Julian would know. Julian could tell her. Almost certainly he was in England, but on the slim chance that he might be at home, she rang Clonfert Park. He was not there, though the maid who answered her was helpful. Mr. Julian was in London and she did not know his latest address or

telephone number. But she would go and ask her mistress for them if Loraine cared to hold on. Loraine thanked the girl and declined, the last thing she wished being either to ask a favour of Julian's mother or to allow her to suppose she wanted any further contact with Julian. She rang off, and there being no one else she could think of to turn to, steeled herself to hearing the news from Ross when he returned. He was late. As always, when he travelled by air, she grew tense with anxiety for him before he arrived, having been delayed on the road from Cork by the fog which had fallen and thickened with every mile, he told her. She noticed that he was carrying the same London newspaper as she had seen. But she waited in vain for him to mention either the news item or the picture. He discarded paper and briefcase together and plunged into action at once with the accumulated papers on his desk. As she prepared to take his dictation she did not know whether she felt reprieved or contrarily resentful of his withholding news which, knowing nothing of her secret pain, he must surely suppose she would be interested to hear. He needed her on hand most of the afternoon, and just before four, when she would ordinarily have left, he looked at his watch. 'If I'm to get through this lot—' he riffled through papers - 'I'm going to have to ask you to stay on for a while. Do you mind?' he asked. 'Of course not, though I'd better tell Shelagh to go on without me.' 'Do that,' he agreed. 'And when we've finished I'll drive you home myself. That is, if you're prepared to trust yourself to me in - that.' He nodded towards the fog-dark window.

Loraine smiled. 'I have to trust Shelagh or you — I've no choice,' she said. 'Then let me compete. Go and tell Shelagh. And, Loraine—' he stopped her on her way to the door - 'will you also go over to the house before you come back? If Morag isn't there, go up to my study. You'll find the draft of the spring catalogue on my writing-table. I shall need it to answer this query from the printers.' Loraine caught Shelagh just as her shift was going off. She gave her message and begged Shelagh to drive carefully in the fog, which Shelagh promised to do, retorting, 'If the Chief is driving you, let you be seeing that he does the same!' In this slack season there was no evening shift to follow; the floors cleared quickly and by the time Loraine reached the brown house the works' whole strength had departed by car, moped or on foot, leaving an unnatural fogbound silence behind. Morag answered her knock, but demurred, 'Sure, the man has a whole crag of papers on that table. How'll I know which it is he wants?' Loraine said, 'I know. I'll come for it myself. He said I was to, if you weren't about.' Morag toiled after her up the stairs, grumbling, 'And where else did he suppose I'd be but at home, on a day that's no day at all, but night before its time? Not fit for decent folk to be abroad. And you, Miss Loraine - look at you! Why haven't you a coat to you and a good hat for your head?' Loraine laughed, 'For goodness' sake - I've only dashed over from the office and I'm going straight back!' She was at the writing-table,

searching it. Morag stood by the door. 'Can you find the thing you're after? she asked. 'I haven't yet—' Loraine broke off, her eye caught ... held against her will. Not by the catalogue, but by something else. The beginning of a private letter in a woman's hand— 'Ross darling, surely? I thought you would have realized that after our big announcement I shall be—' That was the end of the line, and ashamed of reading so far, Loraine pushed a pile of papers over what followed. 'Our big announcement'. What more did she need? If she had been able to reach Julian he could not have put the thing much more plainly. She had only to wait ... For the next minute or two her hands and eyes made only a show of searching the table. Then Morag asked again, 'Do you have it found now?' and she pulled herself together. 'No, not yet. Or - yes.' She lifted the flap of a folder, recognized its contents and straightened, ready to go, just as a long-drawn cry - and another - cut across the uncanny outdoor silence. Morag's eyes met hers. Morag breathed, 'Glory be, what was that?' But Loraine knew. Heard it now in all its present chill, but knew it for an echo of another cry heard before. From this same room. From beyond this same winter darkness. This time, somehow different but agonizing with the same appeal. And this time Morag had heard it too. 'Someone' in trouble - out there!' She flung across the room, thrust Morag roughly aside. 'Call help,' she ordered the old woman, then

was down the stairs, out of the door and across to the quay wall, straining over it. Now, as at that other time, the river was at full tide, sluggish, oilpurple, slapping at the wall and lipping the edge of the tiny shingle beach where the quay children gathered to play at low tide. Except when it was lashed by waves, it was never completely covered. But now, as then, there was no one on it, nor to be seen along the few discernible yards of the wall. Now, as at that other time, there was no third cry. But this time there was - yes, a movement, a bobbing shape ... something untoward out there on the river's surface. Loraine peered and strained and made sure. She was not alone now. Someone - Morag? - had raised the alarm and as before, though sooner this time, Loraine was telling and urging people who did not want to be convinced. 'There's someone in the river! I heard them shout.' She pointed over the wall, into the fog. 'Out there - look!' They huddled and looked. 'D'you say so?' "Where now?' ' 'Tis not a living soul. 'Tis a bolt of driftwood for sure—' 'Driftwood? It's someone, I tell you!' 'And if it was itself, wouldn't they be shouting to be aided, waving their arms?' 'They did shout. I heard them and so did Morag Doul. In this cold they could be paralysed with cramp by now. We're wasting time. Get out of the way! I'm going in.'

Astride the wall she fought off their restraining hands. 'We'll not be letting you,' they said. But she was down on the shingle, shedding shoes, skirt and cardigan. 'You'll do better going for the lifebelt that hangs at the Customs House,' she called back to them, and plunged in. She had been swimming off Tramore and Woodstown since she was five, but never in the river which did nothing to buoy her. Between her shallow plunge and surfacing she lost sight of her quarry and prayed it had not gone down. Then she saw it again; reached it in a score of long leaden strokes and gasped at sight of the white panicstricken face turned up to her. Bridie Ryan! 'It's all right, Bridie, I've got you.' Treading water beside her, Loraine got an arm round her. 'Now do as I say. Let your legs drift up and lie back on the water ... No, back ... I'm behind you—' But from the inert mass which the onlookers had judged to be driftwood, Birdie became, at Loraine's touch, a flailing dynamo driven by sheer terror. Instead of back, she turned inward, her legs wildly kicking and her hands clawing for Loraine's shoulders, weighting her down. For what seemed an age they fought. A few yards away there was a splash. The lifebelt had been thrown, but it was out of reach. There were more shouts and lights from the quay. At last Loraine wrenched an arm free and reached for Bridie's chin in order to thrust or knock it back by force if she had to. But Bridie saw her purpose, came in again with the stranglehold of the neardrowning, and they both went down... down into blackness. They came up. Now they were not alone. The heads of other swimmers bobbed. The lifebelt was there. Firm hands peeled Bridie off Loraine, slipped the belt over her head and shoulders and towed her, unresisting now, towards the shore.

Shocked but, freed of Bridie's tentacles, equal to making her own way back, Loraine faced that way too. But as she struck out someone was close beside her; a hand went to her shoulder and Ross's wet face, almost unrecognizable under its plastering of hair, was level with her own. He smiled at her; she smiled back, not questioning how he came to be there, only content that he was. The pressure of his hand increased. 'Come along, over with you. You know the drill,' he said. 'I'm all right. I can make it on my own,' she protested. 'You'll make it - but under my steam, not yours. Over? He turned her himself, towards him, not away. Treading water, very close to her, he scanned her face and lifted away a strand of her hair which was caught wetly at the corner of her mouth. He said, 'Worth waiting for. But I've been waiting a very long time. Too long—' and kissed her lips in a way which suspended time, the cold that gripped her and all disbelief while it lasted. Then he turned her on to her back. She felt the hard strength of his hands hooding her ears and the powerful thrust of his leg-strokes cutting the water beneath her. She lay*back, giving herself into his care.

An hour or so later she had passed the brandy, hot bath and blanket stage and was in Ross's study with Shelagh who, called by telephone, had brought a change of clothes for her. Bridie had been put to bed in another room. The doctor had been to her and Dan Ryan had been fetched from the Mill. Loraine had seen Ross for no more than a few minutes after they had all come in - she

and Ross dripping water everywhere and Bridie, utterly spent, carried straight to bed. Ross had done his own bathing and drying-off and then had joined the doctor and Dan in Bridie's room, where presumably he still was. When Bridie had been brought to shore there had been a scene which Loraine still shuddered to remember. Shocked and exhausted as she was, Bridie had tried to fight off her rescuers as her panic in the river had fought Loraine. She had whimpered ceaselessly, calling something, a name ... 'Paulie!' 'Paulie—!' chilling all their hearts with a new fear. Someone had whispered, ' 'Tis her gossoon she wants, the poor creature. Had she him with her then before she fell in?' and Loraine had caught at Ross's arm. 'Paulie - he's one of her twins. The other is Barney.' And then - 'Oh no!' she had breathed in horror as she followed Ross's swift glance of apprehension towards the river. He had said quickly and fervently, 'Please God, no. Though it could explain why she went in— 'And as he stooped to Bridie, taking her hands, by the light of the dim nimbus of the quay lamp under which they stood Loraine saw that among the crowd there were those who thought the same. Ross had urged insistently, 'Bridie - Paulie? Why are you looking for him, not Barney? Is it because you know where Barney is, but you're afraid of where Paulie might be? You've lost Paulie - is that it? If so, when? Bridie, say!' But her hysteria had defeated him; she was capable of nothing but incoherence. And so the awful tableau had set for long minutes - until there was a stir behind the crowd and a woman with a shawl over her

head and a toddler on either side was being pushed forward by eager, thrusting hands. "Tis the little ones!' 'With their Grandam Ryan!' 'She had Paulie safe all the while!' 'Let her through now to Bridie, the way the poor girl may rest and be still at the sight of them!' And so, wide-eyed and thumb-sucking, Paulie had come to Bridie. His only reaction at sight of her, forlorn and bedraggled, was a wail of dismay which turned to a bellow of protest as she clutched him frantically to her. Bridie had laughed then, quite naturally. It was a sound of happiness. And as she held Paulie off from her, crooning a little, Loraine, describing the scene to Shelagh, had found only one word - ineffable - for the smile which lighted her face. But she had been in a dead faint when they carried her into the brown house. Shelagh mused, 'I suppose we shan't know, until she can tell us, what took her into the river at all. Raine, you don't think—?' 'No, I'm sure not,' Loraine answered the unspoken question, then hesitated. 'That is, I hope not.' 'What do you mean?' 'Well, when she gave us her notice she had something on her mind that bothered her, but she said she was happy to be leaving, now Dan was to get more pay, and I'm sure she was. This other thing, whatever it was, wasn't enough to make her ... do that. No, her panic over Paulie shows it had something to do with him. If she had missed him

- and you know what streaks of quicksilver those two are - she probably came out on to the quay to look for him; thought, in the fog, she could see him in the river and went in after him, then shouted for help when she found she was out of her depth.' Shelagh nodded. 'Sounds likely. But what a mercy you happened to hear her! Seemingly the first person who did. And from this room too - for the second time. I suppose you've thought of what that means, haven't you, Raine?' Loraine said quietly, 'You can guess what I hope it'll mean to people. There was no special merit to my hearing it and jumping to it. Morag heard it too, so it must be some trick of sound off the quay that carries a shout up here. But as long as it proves I wasn't lying before, that's all I care about.' 'It'll prove that all right. Not that it'll matter much, the way you'll be feted for going in after Bridie when no one else would.' 'It was just that nobody else but Morag and I heard her call out and they couldn't believe she could possibly be in the river.' Talking to Shelagh, drinking tea with her in cosy, normal security was doing something strange and unwelcome to the undercurrent of Loraine's thoughts; carrying away, as if on a relentless ebb-tide, the memory of how Ross had kissed her and said that cryptic thing about having waited a long time ... too long, to do it. So short a time ago - two hours at most? And yet already it was dim with unreality. Had it happened? Yes - But moment by moment she was finding it harder to recall and thrill to the touch of his cold, riverwet lips pressed to hers. It had happened. He had said 'Worth waiting for', and that in itself was an echo of something - she could not remember the context - which he had said before. But though she knew it had happened, by now it was as if it had been the experience of two other people. When next they met they would be Loraine Starr

and Ross Frere. Not strangers. Good friends now. But not the two who had kissed as if they were lovers at a moment of crisis in a river. When Ross came in at that door she would look at him ... surge with love for him, but know that for him as for her it might as well have happened to two other people— Ross came in, answered them both as to how Bridie was and told Loraine, 'I'm taking Dan downstairs for a drink. He needs one. And Bridie wants to see you. Alone, she was rather insistent, so will you go?' 'Of course.' Bridie was sitting up, clad in a voluminous nightgown of Morag's, of which the flannelette collar stood up round her young neck like a piefrill. To Loraine's question as to how she was feeling she said, 'Sure, there's nothing ails me now, but they aren't letting me home till the morning.' And then, 'Miss Loraine, you know it was only the fear that was in me that had me fighting against you out there, don't you?' Loraine soothed, 'You don't have to worry about that. For the moment you didn't know what you were doing.' 'And that's so, I was beside myself with fright. I can't swim. But when I thought I saw Paulie in the water and waded in off the shingle, I had only one notion - to reach him, and I was out of my depth when I got to where he had looked to be and he - wasn't there. They say I must have called out then, and you heard me. Is that the way it was?' 'Morag heard you too. But what made you think Paulie might have fallen in?' asked Loraine. 'Because I'd let him and Barney go next door to Norah Cassidy's while I ran to the shops for a slice of meat for Dan's tea. Their

grandam was having a bit of a sleep in her chair and Norah said she would keep an eye on them. But when I got back she'd gone off somewhere. Barney was there on the lane, and when I asked him where Paulie was he began to cry and he pointed to the quay.' 'Which made you afraid—?' Bridie nodded. 'They know they're not let out on it, without me or Dan or their big cousin Tom Scanlon, who is to be trusted. But while Norah had the care of them for money, she never bothered to hold them back, and when I had the thought that when I had the same scare before, it had been Paulie that time too, I kind of knew where I'd be finding him - if I wasn't too late.' 'He'd been out on the quay alone before? Which other time, Bridie?' 'Not just on the quay. Down on the shingle and up to his waist in the river after his kitten that had followed him down and that he thought would drown, though of course the little thing was out and away and back in the house before him, and he, the young spalpeen, creeping in minutes later, wet to the skin, and I afraid for my very life lest Dan should find out.' Bridie paused and looked away. 'As for when it was, it was one day last winter. On an afternoon that you, of all people, should remember, Miss Loraine. The time when your stepfather lay dying and you - You know?' At the question something in Loraine's brain crystallized, turned from the woolliness of vain surmise, theorizing and conjecture to instant, diamond-hard certainty. But it was still good to say aloud to Bridie: 'Yes, I know. By the same chance that I happened to hear you call for help today, I heard Paulie shout for fright that time. I wasn't as soon on the scene then as I was this afternoon, and by the time I was he had rescued himself and had run home. But I had heard him. And as near as makes no matter, you can prove that I did?'

'I can do more, for I asked him did he cry at all and he said he did twice, just as you said you heard. And then when nobody came to him he scrambled out himself. But for the reason that I daren't tell his father, I hadn't the courage to clear you when they were saying those terrible things about you. Off and on I've been weighted down by the guilt of it ever since. There've been times when I couldn't sleep nor keep my mind on my work for it, and I came near enough to confessing it to you, the day I gave you my notice. And yet at the latter end I couldn't bring myself to it - lest you should see it as your duty to tell on me to Dan.' 'And Dan still doesn't know?' asked Loraine. 'He does now. I just told him, and he shamed me by asking didn't I trust him enough to know he'd have been less angry than sad for me even at the time. Mr. Frere was here too, and it was he that said you had the right to know it, and should he fetch you, the way you could hear it from my own lips. But I said I'd like us to be alone when I told it. So they left me. But one thing more, Miss Loraine - if you asked me to stand up there at your side on the Mall or the Parade and tell the whole city the truth, I'd do it for you - and gladly enough.' Loraine laughed. 'I believe you would too! But I wouldn't ask it of you. You could have helped me by coming forward at the time. But since then I've realized that no one who cares for me or who mattered to me had judged me on mere suspicion. And the others the people who did point the finger - don't matter.' Nor did they. As she told Bridie to put the whole thing out of her mind, that they need never speak of it any more, Loraine knew that it was a shadow she had emerged from for ever. If need be, she could prove now that it had never had any substance. But for just one person - Ross - to have learned that the truth had borne out his faith in her was enough.

For a little while longer she talked to Bridie and heard that when Barney had pointed Bridie to the quay, Paulie had been in the house, teasing his grandmother out of her nap. Then when Dan came to bid his wife goodnight before going home, Loraine went back to the study. She had expected to find Shelagh still there, waiting to drive her home. But there was no Shelagh, nor, now, any light but the pool thrown by an angle-lamp on the writing- table. Only Ross was there, standing by the window from which the curtains were drawn back. His back was turned to her, but at the sound of her entrance he put out a hand behind him. 'The fog has cleared and the stars are out. Come and look,' he said.

CHAPTER TEN HALF willing, half reluctant, but drawn as if by a magnet, Loraine obeyed. And when at his side, his arm went lightly across her shoulders, it seemed at one and the same time the most natural and the most callous thing in the world. He had kissed her. At what impulse - like that? And whatever he had wanted her to understand by the strange thing he had said too, it had all happened within minutes of her having read that sinister - 'after our big announcement', which could only mean one thing between him and the writer of the letter ... At the thought she instinctively narrowed her shoulders as if in rejection of his touch. But after a momentary glance her way, he tightened his grasp and said to the silhouette of the rooftops against the night sky, 'No, you stay put. It's time we faced this issue. Goodness knows, we've skirted it long enough.' 'Wh - what issue?' 'Between you and me - what else? I'd meant we should * come to it tonight anyway. So we're more or less on schedule, though if all this to-do hadn't blown up I'd have used rather more finesse.' He laughed softly and turned her holding her by a hand on either shoulder. 'For instance, my opening gambit - d'you suppose I'm the first chap ever to state his honourable intentions in a tidal river with the temperature at near zero and his teeth chattering like castanets?' Bewildered, she could not look at him. 'That's not - funny,' she said. He laughed again. 'Well, it wasn't particularly - at the time, was it? But what do you mean - "not funny" - in that tone of voice?' 'Because you weren't stating anything honourable.

You couldn't have been.' 'By reason of my not having prefaced my assault with something formal like "I love you, Loraine. Will you marry me?" Come, isn't that asking rather a lot of a man with at least a tiny fraction of his mind on the hot noggin he's going to need once he gets back to shore?' At that she shrugged apart from him and he did not restrain her. She turned back to the window and stared out unseeingly. 'That's what's not funny,' she said. 'Making a joke of it, teasing me out of believing you were serious. You kissed me. All right. And pretended - goodness knows why - you'd been waiting to do it. And I - wanted you to. But I can forget it. You don't have to bend over backwards to pass it off with a lot of slick pseudo-Victorianisms about "honourable intentions" and all that. No, listen—' she stopped him as he seemed about to speak - 'there's something I have to tell you. On your table there's a letter. When I was looking for the catalogue I couldn't help reading the first two lines of it. The - the "Darling" and the bit about your "big announcement". And you can't not know that I saw that restaurant picture of you and - and Cleone Lord, and the gossip about your coming engagement to her. So that's why, if you must know, I find none of all this - funny.' For a moment dead silence greeted that. Then Ross quoted back at her, ' "Darling" - from Cleone to me! I doubt if she ever addresses a friend in any other way. And some shared "big announcement" though not shared with me. And a captioned newspaper picture of a party at which she and I were far from tête-à-tête. And from this, from just this - you dear goose, you knitted this fantasy of my being about to marry Cleone? Well, did you?' 'Not just from that. From - everything else. Your whole association— '

' "Our whole association"? A polite acquaintanceship, little more. A tolerance of her as a vain woman though with, let's face it, plenty to be vain about. A proper awe of her quite ruthless ambition. Even perhaps an indulgence towards her blatant use of people - not excepting myself - on her way up. All this - and any more evidence that I'm in love with Cleone, hm?' Shamed by his ridicule, Loraine defended, 'Whenever you're not there, she always - sort of - claims you. And at London Airport when she was on her way to Paris you kissed her as if - as if you were used to doing it and as if you wanted to.' Ross said patiently, 'On parting from Cleone one grows used to it, and I've enough regard for her self- esteem to pretend enthusiasm. But you're right on one count. She does lay claim to her men friends and dispenses kisses like pats on the head, in the illusion that they'll stay put and be good boys until she next calls "Here, Fido!" and expects them to jump to it. Some do, some don't. And as for her "big announcement" - see for yourself. That is, if you left the damning evidence where you found it. Did you?' 'Of course. I told you, I didn't really read it.' 'I'll say you didn't!' He darted at the writing-table, made hay of the papers there, extracted Cleone's letter. 'But you shall!' Loraine took it from him. 'Ross darling, surely? I thought you would have realized that after our big announcement I shall be—' Her eye travelled to the next line and she read on, turned the sheet for the conclusion, then stared at Ross who had read too over her shoulder.

'Well?' he smiled. She had to grope for words. 'You'd asked her - You had wanted to know about her future plans for the boutique and she's saying that she supposed you realized she had decided to cut her losses on it. That as an experiment it hasn't been a roaring success; Lairge isn't ready for it and the quay, after all, not the best place for it. So if you'll be "understanding" about the lease she won't be needing the premises after - after America and her marriage to - "G.G." And by G.G. she means—?' Ross nodded. 'Exactly. Geoffrey Gray of Lustre Facet. Also the son of an extremely astute father who has built Cleone into one of his most promising assets and means to keep success in the family. Poor Gray junior has played lap-dog to her for years, and we were celebrating his reward when the gossip cameras caught us at Bellini's. Well, are you satisfied now that Cleone is neither a potential bigamist nor unaware of which side she means her future bread to be buttered?' 'Oh, Ross—!' Loraine stopped, having just discovered that when he held her close her head just fitted into the hollow of his shoulder. He waited. Then - ' "Oh, Ross" ' he mimicked. 'Is that all you have to say?' 'Yes. No ... That is—' she leaned back against his arms to bring his face into focus - 'it isn't exactly a Q.E.D. thing, is it? I mean - just because it wasn't true about you and Cleone doesn't make it true about - well, you and me.' She watched him pretend to weigh the point. He conceded, 'You've got something there. Though I'd have thought it helped to get her out of the way. Just as it helped to clear my own decks when I realized you had at last written off your affair with Trent. Which you had, hadn't you, by the time he jumped on the Cleone Lord bandwagon?'

'Before that, though for a long time I didn't want to believe he had finished with me as thoroughly as his people had, after the talk about me.' 'Hm. I must say that, on occasion, he didn't appear to have "finished" with you,' Ross commented. 'But he had. He was only using me as a lever to keep you interested in the History and paying for it. He was dog in the manger too. He didn't want me himself, but his vanity couldn't accept that, once I saw through him, I didn't want him. And after that he took out his spite against me by flaunting our affair to you whenever he got the chance.' 'Warning me off, when he suspected I wanted you myself?' Loraine shook her head. 'No. He thought you wanted Cleone. He was only intent on hurting me, because he guessed that I—' She stopped, biting her lip. Ross stroked her hair. He said gently, 'You know, it would help to make it "true about you and me" if you had gone on from there. So couldn't you?' She drew a long breath. 'Because he guessed that I was in love with you. And he was right. I was. I am. I think I always shall be,' she finished. 'That I'm going to have to deserve and you'll have to prove. But for now, say after me "I love you, Ross" and I'll settle for that.' 'I love you—' 'And I, you. So much. More than you can know. Ah, Loraine—' On a great sighing breath he held her off, then drew her to him again to kiss her, at first, a little tenderly and then fiercely, hungrily. Not asking, but taking. Demanding response of her, making rapture for

them both. And yet giving too ... promising . . . plighting troth without need of words. For the lovers' eternal language of seeking lips and eyes bright with desire and the woman's sweet surrender to the hard, protective strength of male arms said more than enough. Presently he moved with her to one of the roomy armchairs which seemed to have been designed for lovers to share. He sat on the arm, holding her hand, looking down at her, and they found their tongues for endearments and remembering aloud and teasing and asking and answering. Loraine sighed, 'I never thought it was possible to love someone, knowing as little about them as I know about you - about the you that you were before we met. I warn you, I'm going to want to hear it all in time.' 'You shall. What in particular do you want to know about me?' 'Everything from A to Z. For a start, what you were like as a little boy—' 'I had freckles and I was nicknamed Coppernob - what do you suppose?' Ross ran a hand through his tawny thatch in explanation. 'Well, of course! But all the rest— Do you realize you've only once mentioned your mother to me?' 'Have I? Well, be very sure you'll hear about her. She was wonderful. My father was killed in the war. I was an only child. Mother didn't marry again. She worked in an office to keep us both and would have gone on working after I had left school and was working too, if she hadn't contracted heart disease, with only a year or two to live, given rest and care. Less, if she had neither. I thank God I was able to see she had both, and I had her with me for three years more.'

'You went into the glass industry straight from school, I suppose?' 'Into handmade crystal - yes.' 'Into - crystal?' Loraine's jaw dropped. 'Not into commercial glass? Wh - why didn't you tell me?' 'My first love was crystal, ever since I saw a chair at work at a schoolboys' exhibition. Its craftsmanship fascinated me and I couldn't wait to be in on it. But there's less fortune in it than there's satisfaction and I moved over into commercial glass, in which there was a huge post war boom, when I was determined my mother should want for nothing I could earn for her.' Ross grinned wickedly. 'Perhaps I didn't tell you because I found you far too attractive, spitting defiance like a cornered kitten, on the subject of - what was it? - soup and blancmange!' 'You even let me tell you about the Lorrainers as if it was news to you!' 'I did nothing of the sort. I only drew you out - and got rapped about the aforesaid soup and blancmange for my pains!' As she looked thoughtfully away he prompted gently, 'And what now?' 'I was wondering. Would your uncle have known you knew anything about crystal, do you suppose?' 'Well, I'd never met him. But he may well have done.' As if he followed the trend of her question Ross said, 'Are you thinking that, if he did, you could better forgive him for leaving the business to me instead of to you?' She nodded. 'Of course we shall never know, but I'm going to believe he did. And that Mother thought she was doing the best thing for me when she left it to him. Once, when she was very tired, I remember

her saying to me, "Women can, when they have to, but I doubt if they were ever meant to run things as men do, entirely on their own". And so—' Loraine broke off to add shakily, 'Oh, Ross darling, darling, it's goad not to have to feel bitter against people, or misjudged or injured any more!' 'As good, would you say—' he punctuated the question with a kiss for the tip of her nose - 'as feeling yourself as loved as you are?' 'Nearly. Not quite—' 'How nearly "not quite"?' Ross seemed to find the deep, committed look with which she answered that entirely satisfactory. Kneeling to take her into his arms again, he murmured as they kissed again, 'Didn't I tell you once that the real thing was worth waiting for?' Then they talked once more, making plans for a future in which Loraine could still hardly believe. She told him of Julian's bad faith over the History and admitted she had been working on it alone. 'We'll write it ourselves - together,' Ross promised. 'How long do you suppose it should take?' 'Goodness! It depends. Ages more. Years—!' 'Defeatist!' he scoffed. 'We'll aim to get it published, say a year from now.' 'Can't be done. All the research—' 'Then in time for our first wedding anniversary. That's my final deadline. Which gives us just about as much longer as it'll take you to collect your trousseau, young woman. And talking of weddings,

Lairge Crystal is going to town on ours. Dancing on the quay, don't you think? Junketings on the river?' 'In mid-winter?' Loraine queried demurely. He pretended to approve her. 'That's my girl,' he said. 'I knew you wouldn't keep me waiting long. All right, then - equivalent roistering at the Metropole or where- ever. And one thing we're going to have. Liam Doughty is going to design another goblet - for you and me this time. Engraved with our marriage date and with what other design? Crossed swords?' Loraine giggled happily. 'We can't. They're the fabrication mark of Meissen porcelain.' 'What, then? What about the old fellow's cairn up on the mountain where we drew a blank on the night you first let me kiss you? Though bore with my kissing you, would be nearer the truth.' It had also been the night on which Cleone had suspected her of luring him out to Slieve Cooneragh, Loraine remembered. But she did not say so aloud. Cleone was a shadow, dispersed for her for ever by Ross, and she did not want to talk about her any more. For a time they argued mildly about the goblet's design. Ross promised, 'We'll have Liam do one for each of the children - how many shall we have? - and another for their coming-of-age.' 'Good heavens, how long do you expect Liam to live? He's pushing seventy now!' laughed Loraine. Then she remembered to ask where Shelagh was. 'As soon as the fog cleared a bit, I suggested she went home and told her I would bring you back myself. Whereupon she took on that

glazed look that any woman wears when she's mentally checking the larder, and said that when I did I'd better stay to supper.' 'And you will?' 'Well, I accepted. Unless you'd like to ring her and say you're staying here for the night? We're doubly chaperoned by both Morag and Bridie!' But Loraine stood. 'No. No - please.' 'Why not, my heart?' He seemed to search her face for the answer, then found it. 'Because you'd rather not spend a night in this house until you've come back to it as my bride?' he asked. She might have known he would understand. She looked across at the ink-dark square of the window and about her at the softly shadowed room which had held no dread for her since he had stamped it with his personality. This was his house now. But it would be hers again to share with him. She nodded. 'And because - then - I'll have come home,' she said.