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Grace moved the phone from her ear and looked at it, and then it was tightly pressed against her flesh as a voice, a low, deep voice, came over the wire saying, "Grace ... Grace."

She closed her eyes and gripped at the edge of the telephone table, for not for the life of her could she utter a sound.

"Grace ... The voice was lower, deeper.

"Grace ... darling, are you there ... ? Grace."

Her mouth was open, the words were swelling up in her ready to pour out, when she heard Aggie's astringent tone calling sharply, "Grace . I Grace, do you hear me? Are you there?"

"Yes. Oh, Aunt Aggie!"

"Is anybody about?"

Grace shook her head again and was on the point of saying "No' when she heard the door of the nursery close overhead and Donald's footsteps coming towards the stairs, and she said hastily:

"Yes, Aunt Aggie, yes."

"You'll be in tomorrow morning, then?"

"Yes, Aunt Aggie." Donald was in the hall now and she forced herself to talk.

"I've got enough coupons to get Beatrice the outfit that we saw. Yes, I'll be over in the morning ... and ... and meet you.

Good night, Aunt Aggie. Good night. "

She put the phone down as Donald went into the study and, running upstairs towards her own room, she paused on the landing for a moment and looked towards the nursery. She should dash in there now and gather them to her and cry, "Children! Children! Your daddy's come home. Three years and you haven't seen your daddy. But he's home now, home for good, for ever and ever and ever. Just like the fairy tales.

Yes, just like the fairy tales, for ever and ever."

Grace paused for a second before inserting the key into the lock of Aggie's front door. In spite of the snow on the ground and the knife-edged air she was sweating and trembling with it. She had not slept all night waiting for this moment, and now that it had come she was filled with a mixture of shyness, elation, and dread the dread centred round Andrew's reactions to her changed appearance, for she felt that she was no longer beautiful. It was impossible to feel as she did inside and still remain beautiful, and there was the evidence of her mirror to prove it. She was thin to the point of drabness, the bones of her face pressed forward through her skin, her eyes no longer sparkled, her blonde hair now appeared tow-coloured to her and hung limply, without life. Would Andrew see her as she saw herself? The key seemed to turn of its own accord and the door swung open to reveal Andrew, an outsize, bronzed Andrew, standing rigidly posed halfway up the stairs.

"Grace."

He did not leap towards her but advanced slowly, taking one step at a time, his eyes riveted on her.

When he reached the foot of the stairs she hadn't moved from the open door. Not until his arms came out towards her and he spoke her name again in a tone so deep it was akin to a groan did she fling herself forward into his arms.

"Darling, darling! Oh, Andrew!"

His mouth was moving in her hair, over her brow, around her face, and all the while she kept repeating his name, "Andrew, Andrew." When her mouth was covered with his the tenseness seeped from her body, and she seemed to fall into him, right through his hard bony frame into the centre of his being.

Clinging together, they went into the sitting-room, and, still together, they sat on the couch; and together they lay back, not speaking now, and kissed their fill.

It was some time later when Grace whispered, "Aunt Aggie ... where is she?"

"She had important shopping." Andrew smiled whimsically.

"She's very tactful, is Aunt Aggie."

They both laughed softly. Half an hour later Grace lay gazing into Andrew's face. It looked healthy and attractive, made more so by the unusual white tuft of hair to the side of his brow. Her fingers moving over it lovingly, she said, "It might have killed you."

"It might, but it didn't ... it didn't even give me a week in hospital I was never lucky."

"Oh, Andrew!"

"Only in finding you ... there's no-one in the wide world like you."

He had her face cupped in his two brown hands.

"You still think that?" Her question had a plea in it, and he pulled her towards him and held her tightly as he said, "I'll go on thinking it until the day I die."

There was a silence between them now until he asked softly, "Tell me, how are the children?"

There followed another silence before she answered him, and then her voice cracked as she said, "Fine, they're fine." In the silence she had pictured herself on the landing last night after she had received the news of his coming, when she had wanted to run into the nursery and say to them, "Children, your daddy's home."

A strange sadness was now enveloping her; it was seeping into the joy of the moment, depriving it of harmony, of its high pinnacle of easement, and all because it had been impossible to say to her children, "Here is your daddy," and also impossible to watch the light of ownership, the pride of the creator, as Andrew looked on his children after a long separation.

She had longed, ached, lived for this moment, and she told herself that this was heaven and she desired nothing more. She thrust at the sadness, pushing it away, denying herself incompleteness, denying that a vital section of herself was even now in the nursery at Willow Lea.

When Andrew, with a soft yearning in his voice, said, "What does Stephen look like?" she refrained from saying, "Like you," as he had refrained from asking, "Does he look like me?" but she compromised by saying, "Tall, thin," and then added, "He could be dour at times."

They laughed together at this, and he playfully punched her cheek before he asked, "And Beatrice?"

She ran her finger down the bridge of his nose, saying, "This is in evidence and I don't think it's going to add to her beauty."

He touched his nose and the twinkle deepened in his eyes as he remarked, "It's a decent enough neb ... at least my mother always said so."

"Mothers are prejudiced."

"Are you prejudiced?" He was pressing her head into his neck now and she nodded it against him as she murmured, "Yes, very much so." Then she added softly, "Wait until you see Jane. She's like her name, plain and podgy, but she's a darling."

"Yes?" He went on stroking her hair, pressing her face into his neck, keeping it hidden so that she would not see his expression and she knew this. In yet another silence that followed she knew that they were both stalling, warding off the time when Donald's name must be mentioned.

The sound of a key turning in the lock relieved them for a moment, and when the drawing-room door opened they were leaning against the back of the couch, their faces wreathed in smiles, each with a hand outstretched towards Aggie.

"Will you have a drop of soda with it?"

"No, I'll take it neat, thanks, Aunt Aggie."

Aggie handed the glass to Andrew where he sat at the side of the fireplace, then, sitting opposite to him and bending forward, she asked quietly, "What is it, Andrew?"

Andrew swirled the drink around in the glass, looking at it the while, and then, leaning his head against the back of the chair, he cast his eyes ceiling wards before saying, "The war was easier than this at least I could handle my part of it."

"Something gone wrong between you and Grace?" There was an anxious note in Aggie's voice, and Andrew brought his head quickly from the back of the chair as emphatically he said, "No, no, not between her and me."

"What is it then?"

"It's the children."

"Oh." Aggie nodded her head slowly.

He finished the whisky, and after putting the glass on the table at his hand he bent forward, and, placing his forearms on his knees, he looked at Aggie and said, "You know I had visions of picking her up the minute I got home, her and the children, and my mother as well, and going off somewhere. I was even prepared to live on her money until I got a job I knew it wouldn't

take me long to find work. I even played with the idea of accepting your offer' he smiled a little here before adding 'even when I knew it was the worst service I could do you. I'm not made for selling things.

Anyway, I knew I wouldn't be out of work. Wherever there was soil and cattle I would find a job. It seemed easy, simple, when I was all those miles away. It even seemed simple a week ago today when Grace and I met in this room, but it's simple no longer. "

"Did you go to the house?"

"Yes, I went to the house." Andrew now turned his eyes towards the fire.

"I wasn't looking forward to meeting him. I felt ... well, a bit scurvy somehow. That was before I saw him and then all that feeling went. I can't explain it, but when I looked at him any remorse at my underhand dealings vanished. He didn't appear to me like a man at all.

I hadn't the feeling I had betrayed a man. When he stood there with Jane in his arms and said to me, " You haven't seen Jane, have you? "

I could have taken it in different ways that he was taunting me, for instance, telling me he knew all about everything, and yet I reasoned that if that was the case, then it would be impossible for him to act as he was doing at that moment, for he was jolly and laughing and his face looked open. I couldn't credit any man with the power of being so subtle, of being able to act such a part."

"Where was Grace in all this?" Aggie put in.

"She went into the house. I don't think she could stand it."

"I don't think so either."

"You know. Aunt Aggie, I'd been a bit perplexed the first few days because Grace didn't talk about the children, but when I stood on that drive and saw him with the three of them I understood, for if ever I saw three hairns adoring a man it was those three ... my three."

His face was turned completely away from Aggie now, and she could only see his profile, with the ear and jaw-bone twitching. After watching him for a moment she said, "I've been afraid of this, but it's something you've got to face up to. I, me self have had to face it, Andrew.... Grace can't take those children away from that man. Jane perhaps yes, but not the other two, and never Stephen, and she won't leave them and come to you without them."

"I wouldn't want her to." His voice was brisk and the words clipped.

"Well then, you've got to look at this thing squarely. You give her up and go away, or you carry on as you are."

He had turned on her first words and now he answered them by saying,

"Oh, Aunt Aggie, don't be silly," and then, moving his head from side to side, he added hastily, "I'm sorry, but you know what I mean.

There's no separating Grace and me whatever happens it's one of these things that's there for life. "

"Well then, you've got to face the consequences, and don't forget, there's your mother she won't leave the house. You're as tied as Grace is."

"I know that only too well, but the awful thing is, Aunt Aggie, that I want the children more than ever now because of yesterday."

"Yesterday? What d'you mean?"

Aggie watched Andrew pull himself to his feet and walk to the window and back before saying, "Stephen said he didn't like me."

"What? Stephen said that?"

"Yes."

"How did that come about?"

"It was when I was on the point of leaving. Grace came out again; she was standing by the boy, purposely

I think, and she said to him, "Say goodbye, shake hands with Andrew" I went down on my hunkers and held out my hand, and . and he backed away from me and put his hands behind his back and said, "I don't want to, I'm not going to." Grace spoke to him sharply. I could see that she was vexed, so I made my goodbyes, and had just turned away when the boy said clearly, "I don't like him, I don't like that man" It brought me round in my tracks like a bullet. "

Andrew's eyes were looking into Aggie's, and the pain in them struck at her so sharply that she put out her hand and gripped his, saying,

"Don't take any notice of that. Why you know what, I remember telling my own dad that I wished he was dead and I would like to bury him, and I was only eight." She laughed at this point.

Andrew, ignoring the joke, said, "Yes, yes. I've thought of all that about kids being funny and saying unpredictable things, but the unusual thing about it was that he ... the vicar ... never checked the boy.

Grace was all het up, but not him; he didn't even react like a normal man in such a situation and threaten the lad with a skelped backside or something like that. He just stood there with a smile on his face. I felt dreadful. Aunt Aggie, I don't think anything will ever hurt me as much as hearing that child say " I don't like him". I felt in that minute that I couldn't risk going through anything like that again and I'd have to get away. I felt like that until I reached home and saw my mother sitting before the fire. She hadn't said much since I returned, but she must have sensed that there was something wrong and she started to talk. She told me she was all right and that she would manage, she had managed all the time I'd been away, and I was to make my own life make my own life. And there she sat staring into nothing and all through me, and she was telling me to make my own life, and as I looked at her sitting there it came to me that I had no say in the matter, either about Grace, or the children, or her. If I left the fells that minute it would be alone, for neither Grace nor the children nor she would be with me. Nothing had seemingly altered; it was as if I had never been away ... well, there it is, Aunt Aggie."

Aggie said nothing; she was searching for words that would be of comfort to him. He had, she realised, already faced up to the situation before he came to her and he wasn't finding it pleasant. She rose and picked up his glass from the table and, going to the cabinet, she poured him out another whisky, and then she said an odd thing, "Do you think Stephen's yours, Andrew?"

He did not take the glass from her but stared with narrowed eyes into her face before saying, "What makes you say a thing like that. Aunt Aggie?"

"Here, take it." She thrust the glass at him, then, sitting down again, she went on slowly, "Well, a number of things. The lad's disposition, for one, for he's like neither you nor her in ways. Then his looks. There's not a feature of yours in him that I can see, Andrew. But the main thing that's set me thinking this is a bit of reading I did recently, it was by a doctor and he was on about... you know ... well, about impotency. He said the writer he was a doctor well ... She hesitated, embarrassed in her attempt at this delicate explanation.