d enchanted smile. She was aware that her
husband and John watched her from stair to stair; she was aware of their
men's eyes, darkening. Then suddenly she was aware of John's daughter.

Anne was coming towards her across the hall, drawn by the magic, by the
eyes, by the sweet flower smell that drifted (not lavender, not
lavender). She stood at the foot of the staircase looking up. The
heavenly thing swept down to her and she broke into a cry.

"Oh, you're beautiful. You're beautiful."

Mrs. Fielding stopped her progress.

"So are you, you little darling."

She stooped quickly and kissed her, holding her tight to her breast,
crushed down into the bed of the flower scent. Anne gave herself up,
caught by the sweetness and the beauty.

"You rogue," said Adeline. "At last I've got you."

She couldn't bear to be repulsed, to have anything about her, even a cat
or a dog, that had not surrendered.

vi

Every evening, soon after Colin's Nanna had tucked Anne up in her bed
and left her, the door of the night nursery would open, letting a light
in. When Anne saw the light coming she shut her eyes and burrowed under
the blankets, she knew it was Auntie Adeline trying to be a mother to
her. (You called them Auntie Adeline and Uncle Robert to please them,
though they weren't relations.)

Every night she would hear Aunt Adeline's feet on the floor and her
candle clattering on the chest of drawers, she would feel her hands
drawing back the blankets and her face bending down over her. The mouth
would brush her forehead. And she would lie stiff and still, keeping her
eyes tight shut.

To-night she heard voices at the door and somebody else's feet going
tip-toe behind Aunt Adeline's. Somebody else whispered "She's asleep."
That was Jerrold. Jerrold. She felt him standing beside his mother,
looking at her, and her eyelids fluttered; but she lay still.

"She isn't asleep at all," said Aunt Adeline. "She's shamming, the
little monkey."

Jerrold thought he knew why. He turned into the old nursery that was the
schoolroom now, and found Eliot there, examining a fly's leg under his
microscope. It was Eliot that he wanted..

"I say, you know, Mum's making a jolly mistake about that kid. Trying to
go on as if she was Anne's mother. You can see it makes her sick. It
would me, if my mother was dead."

Eliot looked as if he wasn't listening, absorbed in his fly's leg.

"Somebody's got to tell her."

"Are you going to," said E