t grew on the rock border of the pond. Green fleshy stems,
with blunt spikes all over them. Each carried a tiny gold star at its
tip. Thick, cold juice would come out of it if you squeezed it. She
thought it would smell like lavender.

It had a name. She tried to think of it.

Stonecrop. Stonecrop. Suddenly she remembered.

Her mother stood with her by the pond, dark and white and slender. Anne
held out her hands smeared with the crushed flesh of the stonecrop; her
mother stooped and wiped them with her pockethandkerchief, and there was
a smell of lavender. The goldfish went swimming by in the olive-green
water.

Anne's sadness came over her again; sadness so heavy that it kept her
from crying; sadness that crushed her breast and made her throat ache.

They went back up the lawn, quietly, and the day felt more and more like
Sunday, or like--like a funeral day.

"She's very silent, this small daughter of yours," Mr. Fielding said.

"Yes," said Mr. Severn.

His voice came with a stiff jerk, as if it choked him. He remembered,
too.

ii

The grey and yellow flagstones of the terrace were hot under your feet.

Jerrold's mother lay out there on a pile of cushions, in the sun. She
was very large and very beautiful. She lay on her side, heaved up on one
elbow. Under her thin white gown you could see the big lines of her
shoulder and hip, and of her long full thigh, tapering to the knee.

Anne crouched beside her, uncomfortably, holding her little body away
from the great warm mass among the cushions.

Mrs. Fielding was aware of this shrinking. She put out her arm and drew
Anne to her side again.

"Lean back," she said. "Close. Closer."

And Anne would lean close, politely, for a minute, and then stiffen and
shrink away again when the soft arm slackened.

Eliot Fielding (the clever one) lay on his stomach, stretched out across
the terrace. He leaned over a book: _Animal Biology_. He was absorbed in
a diagram of a rabbit's heart and took no notice of his mother or of
Anne.

Anne had been at the Manor five days, and she had got used to Jerrold's
mother's caresses. All but one. Every now and then Mrs. Fielding's hand
would stray to the back of Anne's neck, where the short curls, black as
her frock, sprang out in a thick bunch. The fingers stirred among the
roots of Anne's hair, stroking, stroking, lifting the bunch and letting
it fall again. And whenever they did this Anne jerked her head away and
held it st