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'
Don't go, Helen, if you don't want to,' Emlyn called after her, still stubbornly refusing to be beaten.

'
Don't be so damned selfish,' Evan told him with asperity. 'Nursing you is no picnic—you should realize that. Miss Gaynor needs a break sometimes.' He glanced at her meaningly as she hesitated and she hastily went out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her, hearing Emlyn's murmur of protest as she moved away.

If she admitted the truth she took her dismissal gratefully, for she felt really rather tired. The strain of meeting all Emlyn’s demands was beginning to tell on her. She went along to her room and changed into a cool dress, taking her time and glad of the time to herself.

She brushed her hair until it shone like silk, the brushing action easing the tension of the last few minutes, until she felt quite relaxed.

She had neither the energy nor the inclination to go out and, since Evan was safely upstairs out of the way for a while, she sat down in one of the big armchairs, her head against the high back of it, her eyes closed as she enjoyed the sun on her face. It made her feel pleasantly lazy and quite sleepy. Perhaps it was the warmth and the comfort that induced it, or perhaps she was even more tired than she realized, but she slept—not for long perhaps, but long enough to become oblivious of her surroundings; her head turned to one side, the long fringe of her lashes dark brown against the sun-flushed creaminess of her skin. Her hair was slightly disarranged with her unconscious movements in sleep, and bright against the dark chair, as peaceful as she had been for some hours and yet she was suddenly awake and conscious of the rapid pounding of her heart which was beating uncomfortably fast as if she had been startled and she stirred in her sleep before she opened her eyes wide, wondering if some already forgotten dream had induced the sensation.

She raised her head and Evan's voice snatched the last remnants of sleep from her brain. 'You must have been tired.'

She looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, unable to think what could have awoken her so suddenly and so alarmingly, or so it seemed. 'Yes. Yes, I think I was,' she said, still puzzling. It was not like her to have bad dreams and she was not a nervous person; besides, she felt sure that she would have remembered anything as frightening as that.

'Is something wrong?' he asked with what seemed to her like studied casualness. He was standing with' his back half turned to her, in the window where he usually stood, lighting up the briar with the usual resultant smoke screen.

‘No,' She shook her head uncertainly. ‘No, I don't think so. I think I must have been dreaming.' She looked at him from under her lashes, for some reason connecting him with her sudden awakening. But surely she would not have been so startled when he came in; he was not habitually noisy and his usual silent entry would scarcely have disturbed her sleep, let alone woken her so frighteningly. ‘Did you just come into the room?' she asked.

He drew on the briar for a second or two before he answered. 'I did. Why?'

'
Oh, nothing.' She shrugged off the feeling, laughing at her own imagination. 'I must have been dreaming, but I can't think what about, for a moment I felt— Oh, I don't know, anyway it doesn't matter.'

He turned and for a moment she saw the vestige of a smile round his mouth, but his black eyes were as inscrutable as ever as he walked over to the door and opened it. Watching him, she saw him turn and look at her with that ghost of a smile still in evidence. 'You should read more fairy tales,' he told her with unaccustomed lightness, and added: 'I'm going out for a while; Mrs Beeley will get you tea when you want it,' and before she could reply he had closed the door quietly behind him.

She sat for only a few puzzled minutes, trying to decide what he could possibly have meant by that facetious reference to fairy tales, before Mrs Beeley's head appeared round the door. 'Would you like a cup of tea, love?' she asked, her smile anticipating Helen's company for a chatter as she often did.

Helen smiled her thanks. ‘I'd love one, please, Mrs Beeley. Shall I take one up to Emlyn first?'

The little housekeeper shook her head, making a wry face.

'
Better not, love. Mr Davies said I wasn't to let you go up there again this afternoon; he reckons Mr Emlyn would keep you there, see, and he wants you to have your rest time. I'll go, he won't be wanting to keep
me
up there.' She laughed at her own jest and withdrew to take tea up to Emlyn, leaving Helen smiling over the precautions Evan had taken to make sure that Emlyn had no chance to talk her into staying with him again. Once, she admitted, she would have been intensely annoyed at the idea of his leaving instructions regarding her actions, and especially with the housekeeper; now she merely accepted that he did most things with a good intention even if it was not always obvious at first.

Seated in the bright, roomy kitchen Helen looked up with a smile of enquiry when Mrs Beeley rejoined her and the little woman laughed tolerantly. 'Very disappointed he was that it wasn't you brought his tea. Gave me quite a nasty look when I came out. Poor Mr Emlyn.' She sat herself down and poured out tea for them both. 'It's too bad of Mr Evan to go out just when tea was ready.' she clucked disapprovingly, 'but there you are—'

'
I'm afraid I've been very lazy this afternoon,' Helen confessed. 'I sat down for a few minutes and I fell asleep, it's a thing I seldom do during the day. I expect it was the sun and that comfortable chair.'

'I expect you needed it,' Mrs Beeley retorted. ‘It must be very hard nursing Mr Emlyn, especially now he's more himself. He's a very spry young man, that one, and never did take easy to being kept still.'

'
He is rather a handful,' Helen admitted, 'but he could be worse. At least he's cheerful most of the time.'

'
But he keeps you on the go, I know, I've heard you when I've come upstairs. No wonder you fell asleep in the chair. Anyway it won't do you any harm, will it? I looked in earlier, but you was sleeping away like Sleeping Beauty and I didn't want to disturb you.'

Helen blinked at the words, the colour already in her cheeks when she spoke. 'Who, did you say?'

‘Sleeping Beauty,' Mrs Beeley supplied brightly, not missing the sudden colour but making no comment on it.

‘You know the fairy story, love—the princess that was waked by a handsome prince kissing her.'

‘Yes, yes, I know the one,' Helen said hastily, and laughed to cover her embarrassment. 'But I'm not a princess, and there are no handsome princes these days, are there?'

'Oh, I don't know,' Mrs Beeley demurred. 'There's plenty of good-looking young fellers about, an' it's the same thing, isn't it, really?'

Helen smiled thoughtfully, her mind flurrying round the possibility that it had been Evan that had woken her so startlingly. She found it hard to believe and yet the longer she stayed at Glyntarrach the more similarities she could see between the two men; if it was an action typical of Emlyn, and he had already proved that it was, it could equally apply to Evan, she supposed. Definitely something had amused him when she had appeared so puzzled and he had worn that strange smile when he left her. Had he made that particular remark about fairy tales, she wondered, with the intention of letting her know that it was him?

'Something wrong, love?' Mrs Beeley asked, obviously puzzled by her preoccupation.

'
Helen shook her head with a smile. 'No, nothing wrong, Mrs Beeley.'

'
Oh, I wondered.' The friendly eyes smiled at her. 'You seemed a bit thoughtful like; I wondered if something was worrying you. You're just tired, maybe. I always think it must be a very tiring job being a nurse, always on the go.'

'It's a vocation,' Helen admitted. 'If you're not cut out for it, you don't do it, but it's very worthwhile usually.'

'
It was lucky Doctor Neath knew about you, it's done Mr Emlyn no end of good having you to look after him.' There was an implication in the smile and the words that Helen chose to ignore.

'Emlyn has determination to get well,' she said, 'and that's more than half the battle in a case like his. If a nurse doesn't get co-operation from the patient it's almost a lost cause from the beginning, and he's been very good.'

'
He's a lovely boy,' Mrs Beeley said fondly. 'Always was from the time I came here, as housekeeper that is, and he was no more than seven or eight years old then and a lively little lad. Mind you,' she added with an indulgent smile, ‘he's always been a lad for the pretty girls; like his father, you see, and his grandfather too, for that matter. The Davies always liked pretty girls, and married them too.'

Helen wondered if the habit applied to Evan; it had never occurred to her that he was likely to be impressed with a pretty face; it had certainly done nothing to make him any less hurtful to Tracey Owen. Thinking of the girl, she spoke thoughtfully. ‘Has Miss Owen ever been here to Glyntarrach ?'

Mrs Beeley frowned for a moment as if the mention of the girl displeased her as it did her employer. 'She came once or twice before the accident; I wonder, at her having the gall to come here again like she did, knowing how Mr Evan feels about her.'

‘Tracey Owen was a sick girl,' Helen said firmly. 'She was in hospital, in fact she was in for some time and she made herself ill worrying about Emlyn, the fact that she wasn't allowed to see him was scandalous, I told Mr Davies so.'

‘You told Mr Evan that?' The housekeeper's eyes rounded in surprise. 'Ooh, there's unkind you were, love, and the poor man so worried about the boy, then you go and blame him for that girl being ill.' She shook her head sadly and Helen felt a surge of impatience.

'
He was as responsible for Tracey Owen's as she was for Emlyn's. They both acted thoughtlessly and someone else suffered. And it wasn't worry that made him act as he did,' she added shortly. 'It was sheer obstinacy. He's a stubborn man and too used to having his own way.'

‘And who's to say he shouldn't?' Mrs Beeley asked reasonably. ‘He's the master here and the Davies were always strong characters, used to being obeyed. It's bred in them, you see.'

'
Then it's time they were challenged,' Helen said with far more bravado than she had shown when she had meekly left Emlyn's room only a short time before on Evan Davies' orders.

Mrs Beeley smiled, an odd sort of speculative smile that made Helen feel uneasy wondering what lay behind it. 'You'd do it, too,' she said with conviction. 'What a coincidence it is, you being like you are.'

'Coincidence ?' Helen asked, puzzled. 'Coincident with what, Mrs Beeley?'

The little woman smiled again, shaking her head as she looked at her for a moment without speaking, then she put down her cup with a certain air of deliberation and absently traced the pattern on the saucer with one finger while she spoke. 'My mother was here in Mrs Davies' time,' she said. ‘Mrs Clifford Davies that is, Mr Evan's mother, and I was here for a time as well when I left school until I married Beeley and left to have the children. My mother could tell you all manner of things about the family. She was a Howell before she was married, you see.' Helen did see when she remembered Owen's story of how the Howell women had always staffed the Davies house, until the tragedy that caused Dilys's death, and the bloodless feud between the families.

' I've met Mr Alun Howell,' she said, and saw the frown that creased the normally good-natured face. 'Please go on, Mrs Beeley, I'm sorry I interrupted.'

'
I remember Mrs Clifford well,' Mrs Beeley went on with only a momentary pause. 'Pretty little woman she was, small and yellow-haired with lovely blue eyes, and there wasn't much of her either; but she could wrap Mr Davies, her husband, round her little finger when she'd a mind to, and he was a man just like Mr Evan is now—tall and proud as Lucifer.' She sighed nostalgically. 'He adored her, always, right up until she died, poor lady, she could always get him to do anything she wanted him to. It broke the poor man's heart when she was killed like that. He never really got over it.'

'He died very shortly afterwards, I understand,' Helen said cautiously, not wishing to reveal the source or the extent of her knowledge.

'He did,' Mrs Beeley agreed. 'Oh, Mr Evan's had a sad life one way and another, and now he's got the worry of Mr Emlyn being so bad.'

'
Not any more,' Helen said more cheerfully. 'He's well on the mend and there's no reason why he shouldn't be quite recovered in a matter of weeks now, or at least recovered enough to dispense with my services.'

'
Mmm.' The friendly eyes looked at her. 'Funny though, isn't it, you being so like Mrs Davies with that yellow hair and lovely blue eyes,
and
being such a pretty girl too.' She eyed Helen speculatively with a smile hovering round her mouth. 'You can manage the menfolk, too, it seems; it was very lucky that Doctor Neath knew you and brought you here.' The gist of the conversation left Helen in no doubt that the housekeeper had been speculating on her relationship with the Davies, perhaps just Emlyn or possibly both of them, and she found her outspokenness embarrassing in the extreme.

‘I needed a change,' she said, deliberately ignoring the implications, 'and it's certainly very lovely country around here. I wish Mr Neath would come back for another holiday, though. I miss being taken out, I'm rather lazy when it comes to taking myself out, I find, and I'm more inclined to laze around instead of walking as I should.'

'
Oh, yes, Mr Owen Neath.' Mrs Beeley sounded and looked disappointed. 'He's a nice young man, isn't he?'

'
Very nice,' Helen agreed, intent on creating a false impression although she had seen Owen Neath only seven or eight times. They had exchanged letters at intervals, but neither of them was a very good correspondent and it was some time since she had written an answer to his last letter. 'I've missed him the last few weeks,' she added for good measure. Mrs Beeley made no comment, but having got the conversation away from the rather intimate subject of herself and the Davies she determinedly kept it on more general lines for the next hour or so.