1

"I've changed my mind. I won't sell after all!"

Even as Cynthia spoke and saw the startled astonishment on her solicitor's face and surprise, mingled with a slightly mocking amusement in Robert Shelford's dark eyes, she knew that she was making a fool of herself. She had to sell, of course she had - but her remark sprang from an impulse that she could not explain or control. She was aware that it made her appear idiotic and illogical, and interrupting Mr. Dallas, who had already begun to speak, she added, despising her own weakness,

"At any rate I would like time to think it over."

"But, really, Miss Morrow, it's a little late in the day." Mr. Dallas began irritably and was interrupted again, this time by Robert Shelford.

"If Miss Morrow does not want to sell Birch Vale," he said quietly, "I shall quite understand. I want the place so much that I can sympathise with anyone for not wishing to part with it."

Cynthia glanced at him sharply. Somehow, instead of being grateful for his championship she resented it. What right had he, she asked herself, to want Birch Vale so much? Why, indeed, should he want it at all? It was hers, hers. For a moment she faced the two men defiantly as if she were defending the place against them, and then slowly, relentlessly, her defiance ebbed away. She felt deflated and empty. What was the use? It was inevitable that the place must go, and if not to Robert Shelford, then to somebody else, perhaps to someone who did not care for the house but wanted the grounds for a building estate or something equally horrible.

Yet Cynthia knew that part of her defiance and the basic reason for her impulsive cry that had shattered the quiet formality of their conference, was due to the fact that Robert Shelford did want Birch Vale. It was like seeing someone one loved turning to another, she thought, and knew from the sudden agony in her heart that the simile was apt because it hurt her so desperately.

What was the point of fighting? Why must she go on deepening the wound, making herself more and more miserable? She had known she must sell Birch Vale a month ago when she had come back to England and called at her solicitors to discover in what a chaotic mess her father's affairs had been left. She had known then that she had lost Birch Vale, and she had known it even more forcibly this morning when she had come down early from London to take one last look before she signed away her ownership.

"You are lucky, Miss Morrow," Mr. Dallas had told her. "Very lucky! Mr. Shelford came to us because he had heard of Birch Vale when he was abroad and he wondered if there was any chance of it even coming into the market. The moment I realised how interested he was, I saw what a piece of good fortune it was for you, Miss Morrow. We have always had your interests at heart, and both my partners and myself were distressed, deeply distressed, at your father's ... er ... well, shall we say improvidence? We feel we have been able to do you a good turn in introducing Mr. Shelford to Birch Vale, and incidentally, Miss Morrow, you save an agent's fee."

"Thank you, Mr. Dallas."

There was nothing else Cynthia could say, even though her heart had cried out at the sacrilege of selling Birch Vale. She felt a traitor to herself and to all the traditions of her blood. And yet what did it matter? What did anything matter, now that Peter and she...

She had tried not to think about them - Peter and Birch Vale - but inevitably the day had loomed nearer and nearer when she must go down to the house, must see it and say goodbye.

She had played with the idea of settling the whole thing in London, but she knew that was a coward's course. What was the point of running away? If you ran away, even from your own thoughts, sooner or later they caught up with you. Cynthia knew that. Yet she had put off going to Birch Vale till the last moment, in fact until today when the deeds were to be signed.

Mr. Dallas had forced her hand by saying,

"Mr. Shelford would like to meet you, Miss Morrow, and there are one or two things he wants to ask you about Birch Vale. I think it would be wise for you to see him. There is the position of the pensioners to be discussed, of course, and Mr. Shelford is very interested in the history of the house. No one can tell him as much as you can."

There was no help for it, Cynthia realized, that she had to meet Robert Shelford, she had to talk to him - this man who was taking away from her the one thing that had ever given her a sense of security, the one thing she had really loved in her life besides Peter. And yet Birch Vale and Peter were indivisible, they were so much a part of each other. She had known that this morning when she had turned in at the gates to see the drive winding its familiar way beneath the great avenue of oak trees. The drive twisted and turned and there ahead was the house. How many moods Birch Vale had! How could Cynthia know which she loved the best?

When she was abroad these last three years she had dreamed of Birch Vale almost every night, dreamed of it even when she had slept fitfully, her pillow wet with tears, the tears she had shed for Peter. How could she ever live there again, she had asked herself then, unless he was with her? And yet she had gone on dreaming - of the swans passing gravely over the silver surface of the lake, of the grand staircase with its heraldic leopards on top of the newels, of the sweet fragrance of the linen-cupboards, of the swaggering magnificence of the banqueting hall, of the picture-gallery where the portraits of her ancestors stared solemnly down as they had danced.

"I love holding you in my arms," he said once, and added possessively, "I hate to think that you could dance with anyone else. It's wrong when you belong to me."

"I belong to you," she had whispered almost beneath her breath, and raised her eyes to his, ecstatic and radiant.

They stopped dancing then and stood very still. Their eyes held each other for a long moment, and then their lips met.

"I love you." It was Cynthia who spoke first.

His arms tightened.

"Isn't it extraordinary that we have known each other for so long and never known that we loved each other like this?"

"Perhaps we ought to have known," she answered, wrinkling her brow and moving her head back a little so that she could look up at him.

"I suppose we were too young to understand what love meant." Peter spoke so seriously that Cynthia laughed.

"We are not very old now. Let me think, you will be twenty-one next month and I shall be nineteen next January."

"We are both old enough to know our own minds." Peter said it so fiercely that instinctively Cynthia drew a little closer to him.

"Of course we are old enough. What do they know about it, croaking and groaning about blood relationship? We can't help being in love any more than we can help being first cousins."

"Forget them, the fools!"

And now, as the music of the radiogram quickened, they were dancing again, dancing crazily, wildly, madly, twirling, twisting, so close that they might have been one body, defying all the criticism in the world by the sheer youth and vitality that bubbled exuberantly within them.

Oh, Peter! Peter! How could she think of Birch Vale and not remember Peter? Older memories going back down the years, Peter walking with her very early on an Autumn morning - Peter crying because his dog had been run over - Peter coming back from school and telling her grandly that his greatest friend, Hodgson major, had no use for girls. How hurt she had been! She had crept away to the deep window-seat in the library and cried alone, yet the memories of that window seat were tender, loving ones. It was there, in the secrecy of ancient tapestry curtains, that Peter had asked her to marry him soon after his twenty-first birthday.

He had been shy of her that day. He had played with her hand while he was talking, afraid to raise his eyes to hers. And she had listened in silence because the sheer bursting glory of the happiness within her heart had held her breathless.

"Peter! ... Peter!"

As if he had to ask her, as if he need have questioned what her answer would be! She had always loved him, loved him ever since they had been children together, brought up in the same house by the same parents because Peter's father and mother were dead.

He had raised his eyes at last, and the look on her face had told him all he wanted to know.

"Oh, my darling," he stammered, and they had kissed then for the first time, tight, quick, inexperienced kisses, while they were both frightened of the hunger that lay between them.

'Peter!' Every brick and stone, every corner of Birch Vale called out his name. Would she ever be free from the desolation and the anguish? Why try to escape? It was no use, she had tried all through the war, and tried again when, as hostilities came to an end, she had volunteered for India. The long, arduous hours of nursing somehow now seemed only a nightmare. She could hardly remember the people with whom she worked, the patients whom she tended. Only Birch Vale had been real to her, Birch Vale and Peter - whom she would never see again.

She had received a decoration for the work she had done, and it mattered so little that she was surprised when people congratulated her. She had volunteered for further service, for more strenuous work, and was bitterly resentful when her body rebelled against her determination and refused to do any more. She had collapsed, been sent home and finally discharged. Discharged! When she most wanted to stay...