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Five minutes later Andrew, crouched on his hunkers before her, said in an unsteady voice, "How long have you known this?"

She let her eyes linger on him before she answered, "About two years."

"Good God."

The two words condensed the searing compassion he was feeling and he bowed his head before her.

Grace did not like Gerald Spencer, but at least she thought he had one asset he was not impotent. The concern in her mind now was to keep any disgrace from Beatrice, and this lifted her thoughts from herself and helped her more than anything else could have done at this time towards readjustment.

Although at times she was subjected to bouts of terrifying fear of the dark, and swearing, and thought she was back to where she had been at the beginning, at others she knew, and knew with certainty, that only now was she seeing the whole situation in its right perspective, for she faced the fact that she would never be free to go to Andrew until her children were settled. Her love for Andrew was seeping back into place, but it was subject, as it had always been really, to the children's welfare.

She had decided also, and quite calmly, that if she heard that there was the remotest possibility of Donald returning to the house she would take a long holiday, and Jane would go with her. This could be accomplished without scandal, for to the village she was still ill.

Those who had been in an asylum were never . well, the word used was right. They would say, "They're never right, you know." To the majority, the stigma of an asylum could only be thrown off by death.

Grace was painfully aware of what the villagers thought, but this same opinion, she knew, would relieve her of their condemnation should she remove herself from the needs of a sick husband.

Oddly enough, since her breakdown she had acquired a greater fear of scandal than ever before. Had the truth come out years ago she herself would have been the main sufferer. But not now. Her family were no longer children; they were a young man and two young women at vitally impressionable stages of their lives. Nothing must affect them.

If there was one thing she was grateful for now it was that she had been prevented from screaming out the truth on that dreadful night a year ago.

Yet again things did not work out as she planned. Two months after Beatrice had married, David told her that Donald was leaving the hospital and was going to a nursing home near Have, for he was still very ill, but the very next day he walked in through the front door and in to the drawing-room.

It was one evening early in the spring of 1959. Andrew Maclntyre was doing the garden, Jane was curled up on the couch where it was placed before the window, and Grace was sitting by her side, her hands lying idle in her lap. She was watching Andrew. She always felt soothed if she could look at Andrew; she seemed to draw quietness from him and into herself. His rhythmic movements, which appeared slow, but which speedily disposed of the work, were a kind of joy to her. Andrew was good. She would say to herself numerous times a day: "Andrew is good."

It seemed to sum up his whole character . his faithfulness, his reasonableness, and his patience, mostly his patience.

His mother had died three months ago, and it would not have been surprising, now he was released from that shackle, and knowing that she herself could not again bear to live in the same house with Donald, had he pressed her to go away with him. At times she had a strong feeling, and not only recently, that inside, under his patience, he was straining against the unnaturalness of his life. It would become most apparent when, held tight against him, she felt the not infrequent force of his passion. But when she would say, "Oh, Andrew, we just can't go on like this', as she had done over the years, he would reassure her, saying, " Patience. Things will pan out. "

Meetings were no easier to arrange than they had ever been; in fact, if anything they were more difficult, for now there were often four pairs of eyes to be wary of. Only last night, when she had pointed this out to him, he had said, "Remember years ago, when I told you I could love you without touching you? Well, that still holds good."

Then for a few moments he had loved her fiercely. Andrew, she had learned, was a strange mixture of passion and reticence. She could not fully understand him and considering that during all the long years of their intimacy the hours they had actually spent together amounted only to a matter of weeks, this was not to be wondered at she could only be glad in the depths other heart that he was as he was. Andrew was good.

The actual words were once again crossing the surface of her mind when she heard someone enter the room.

After she had slowly turned her head, her hands jerked upwards and clutched at her throat. She could not rise, she just sat in a twisted position, staring.

Donald sat down on the first chair nearest to hand. He looked desperately ill, weird, gaunt and ungainly; there seemed nothing of the suave parson left. He sat looking at' her quite impersonally, and in this panic-filled moment she knew he wanted nothing from her, nothing at all, not even pity. Neither had he any for her. She knew that for him she had died quite finally that night of revelation in the bedroom, when she became no longer any use as a face-saver.

Still sitting in the twisted position, and too stunned to move, she watched Jane, who gave an almost agonised cry, fly to him and fling her arms about his neck. The demonstration seemed too much for him, and after patting her head he pressed her from him and asked if she would get him a drink of water.

Taking a long, gasping breath, he once again looked at Grace. Then in a few terse, unemotional words, he told her why he had come back. He knew he was to die soon, and he wanted to do it in his own home.

As in years gone by, there welled up in her a flood of pity for him, but as she continued to stare at him, the man himself, the man in the soul of him, the suave, evasive dispenser of mental torture, pressed against the feeling and it subsided. But strangely, she did not doubt his word. She did not say to herself, "He has only come back because he knows I am alone with Jane, and he is afraid he will lose his power over her." No, she believed him.

That his attraction for Jane had lost nothing in his absence she witnessed in the next second. Returning at a run with the glass of water, Jane hovered over him like a mother over a sick child. And Grace knew as she looked at them together that if she went upstairs this minute and packed she would leave the house alone. She could no more take Jane away from him now than she could have taken Stephen years ago. The very suggestion that she should leave her sick father would. Grace knew, lose her her daughter now. No, if she went she would have to go alone. But she couldn't lose Jane, she couldn't.

She

had lost the others, she couldn't lose Jane. She must talk to Andrew Andrew . Andrew. She cast her eyes to where he stood rigidly stiff, his eyes riveted on the window, then she pulled herself up from the couch and made her way towards the door. And as she left the room, neither Donald nor Jane seemed to notice her going. Three weeks later, Donald, as good as his word, died, and so prevented her from having to take refuge with Aggie. He did it dramatically one evening on the steps of the altar. And who should be with him there at the end but Kate Shawcross. Grace was not sorry that this should be so, for she had loved him. But what sickened Grace was the significance the post mistress gave to it. Throwing all discretion aside, she declared openly to Grace while her face streamed with tears that God had willed that Donald should die in her arms, and that he had done so with her name on his lips. She was so distraught she made no secret in the village of what she spoke of as the Will of God.

The village buzzed as villages will. Kate Shawcross was a fool, it said, and brazen with it. Fancy saying a thing like that! Then as usual two and two were put together and conclusions jumped to. No wonder the poor vicar's wife had gone off her head. And everyone remembered how often the post mistress had gone up to Willow Lea when its mistress was absent. Well now, would you believe it? And they did believe it. Until Christmas week, 1960, when Peggy Mather opened her mouth.

Grace was the only one seated. She sat at the end of the couch, her head bowed, her eyes fixed on her tightly joined hands resting in her lap. At the head of the couch Andrew stood with his left hand pressed into the padded upholstery. To his right, and both standing with their backs against the end of the grand piano, were Beatrice and Jane, and on the hearth rug in front of the fire stood Stephen. Grace could see his legs and his knee-caps twitching from time to time. She could not bear to look at him and see the hate of herself pouring like steam from his bloodless face. His colour was that of. rice paper, his skin had the same smooth texture. He had been talking for some time, spewing words out, words coated with venom, words that ill-became a prospective man of the Church. But at this moment Stephen was nothing but a young man fiercely defending his heritage and denying with every pore of his body the claim of this rugged Scot as his father.

' . If you . if you were to go on your knees and swear on the Cross I wouldn't believe you, do you hear? I know what I am, I know where I came from . inside here. " He thumped his chest, and the action, although intent, had nothing dramatic about it.

"I know I'm like my father. My father, do you hear? His thoughts are my thoughts, his ways, his principles, everything ... everything.."

Grace raised her head, and Andrew, thinking she was about to protest, placed his hand on her shoulder. But Grace had not been going to protest. She was just looking at her son to try to convince herself that he was wrong, for listening to him she was imagining that it was Donald who stood once again on the hearth rug his back to the fire.

And it wasn't Stephen's stance alone that conjured up Donald, for even without the slightest facial resemblance to Donald he was, at this moment, almost his chosen father's double. The doubt that had assailed her over the early years from time to time recurred, and if it would have been any help now she would have said, "All right, there is a doubt, take the benefit of it." But she knew, even if she could have made the last great effort and brought herself to say such a thing, that it wouldn't have helped in the least. She had talked for what seemed hours trying to tell them the facts while endeavouring not to blacken Donald, trying to put him over as David had always described him . a sick man, even knowing as she talked that this was merely white-washing. But in spite of her knowledge she had done it, and with what result? Merely to bring forth Stephen's hate. She knew that her son had never really loved her, but now his distaste of her amounted to loathing. Whatever reaction the girls would make had yet to be seen, but one thing was already certain she had lost Stephen. Yet hadn't she lost him even as a baby? Yes, but the pain hadn't been like this.

As she unloosened her hands and pressed them to her throat Andrew spoke for the first time.

"Whatever you say, it makes no difference. I know how you feel' his voice was low and steady and held no bitterness 'but the fact remains, whether you like it or not, I'm your father." Yet as Andrew stressed this statement, a point in the conversation he'd had with Aggie after his demobilisation sprang to the forefront of his mind,

"Impotency didn't mean a man wasn't fertile." Whenever he and Stephen had come face to face in the past few years he had denied this statement entirely, but now, as he looked at the young man he was claiming as his son, he acknowledged for the first time a grave doubt, for he could see no trace of himself or his forebears in the ascetic face that was glaring at him. No-one had spoken in the pause and he now went on:

"If your mother had done as she wished she would have taken you away when you were a baby, but she stayed here for my sake. I was tied here, as she's already told you. But these latter years she has remained here not for my sake, but for yours, all of you." His eyes moved to the girls.

"She wanted to see you all settled before ... before she began to live her own life."

Grace's head drooped again. Yes, that had been her main concern, to see them settled, with no scandal emanating from her to spoil their lives. She realised now that, strangely enough, this had always been the main purpose of her life, to keep herself clear of scandal. Her attempts to leave Donald she saw now as halfhearted gestures. She had submitted herself to years of mental torture not so much to be near Andrew, but to keep herself unsullied in the eyes of her children.

Even the breakdown and the language she had frothed out at the time had left, as far as she could see, no adverse impression on them.

Rather her illness had aroused their compassion. But now here, at the very last minute, she had to be exposed to them and in such a way that it would appear that either fate or God was determined to make her pay for her sins. Or was it perhaps the spirit of Donald still at work, justifying himself and his principles? As ye sow, so also shall ye reap. Whatever it was it was weird . uncanny, that the instrument chosen to expose her should be Jane's beloved George.

That this man she had seen only twice, and for a matter of minutes each time, should be both accuser and deliverer was in itself, she felt, beyond the bounds of ordinary happenings.

She raised her head to look towards Jane, but was caught once again by the glare of Stephen's face, and he was speaking to her. He was answering Andrew by speaking to her.

"No matter what he says ... what he says, I don't believe a word of it, do you hear?"

He was shouting now, and Andrew put in sharply, "Don't speak to your mother like that. Say what you have to say to me."

"You ... Stephen moved from the rug and it seemed for a moment that he was going to strike out at the man before him. But when Andrew neither spoke nor moved he recovered himself, and after turning one last long look of loathing on Grace he rushed from the room, banging the door behind him.