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The memory of her father consoled her for a while and she could imagine, with just a little effort, that these were his roses that she could smell and see and that she was home again in their own lovely garden. So preoccupied was she that she stayed out longer than she intended and was brought swiftly back to earth when she turned a corner and came unexpectedly face to face with a young man of about Emlyn Davies' age. He put out his hands to prevent the collision that seemed inevitable and ran his eyes over her in a swift and flattering appraisal.

'
You'll be Miss Gaynor,' he said, making it a statement rather than a question. 'I'm Dai Hughes, miss.' His accent was much more pronounced than any she had heard so far and she found the lilting sing song of it fascinating to listen to. She smiled and proffered a hand which he took willingly, retaining it a fraction longer than was necessary.

'
Hello, Mr Hughes; Mr Emlyn mentioned you earlier.' Bright blue eyes smiled briefly at the statement.

'
He told me about you too, miss,' he said, the appraising eyes sweeping over her again, 'and he was right about you too. You're quite a looker, if I may say so, miss.' His humility was very obviously false and she could not restrain a smile at the impudence of him.

'
The garden is very lovely,' she said, to change the subject and he concurred, obligingly.

'
It takes a lot of hard work,' he said, 'but it's worth it now, isn't it? Me and old Arnold are at it most of the time when I'm not with Mr Emlyn, of course. You know anything about roses, miss?'

'A little,' Helen confessed. 'My father grew them, he loved them.' He nodded his head, as if he already knew about her father, probably from Emlyn also, they seemed to exchange news the two of them.

'We
got some beauties here,' he told her, obviously anxious to show off his favourites. 'You seen them Ena Harkness down by the bottom end there? Lovely they are, we took a first prize with them in Gllanmerran this year.' He walked beside her down the path as he spoke, urging her towards the prize blooms he was so proud of, and Helen went, unprotesting, intrigued by his obvious pride in the roses and finding his company far more congenial than that of his employer. She once again admired the deep red velvety blooms and breathed the heady scent, while Dai Hughes smiled at her broadly, accepting her admiration as personal acclaim.

Right at the edge of the garden where a hedge of lesser roses bordered a footpath she stopped to look at the rapidly rising ground. The path rose with the mountain, curving round it like a ribbon and disappearing out of Sight some thirty or forty feet up. The light was fading now, but slowly, and it was still quite strong, but there were shadows under the dark mass of rock that rose before them, shadows that made it difficult to see clearly for any distance and distorted the scrub that grew on the lower slopes into odd shapes of movement.

Helen caught her breath suddenly as a movement, more definite than any of the others, stirred among the lower scrub, almost up to the hedge of roses, and Dai Hughes, hearing her intake, looked at her sharply.

'Something wrong, miss?' He followed her gaze, narrowing his eyes to see in the bad light.

'Something moved down there,' she said, feeling a little foolish for behaving so nervously, there was something about Glyntarrach that seemed to sharpen all her senses. The man peered at the scrub, only half convinced, she thought.

'I don't see anything, miss. It was probably only a sheep. They run about on the mountain, you know, but they're harmless you know, they wouldn't hurt nobody, not them old woollies.' It seemed to her that he was trying rather too hard to convince her, and she wondered why.

'It wasn't a sheep,' she argued, going forward to the hedge again, and he laughed easily.

'Then what else would it be, miss?' he asked. 'We ain't haunted not as far as I know, though 'twouldn't surprise me too much if we was.'

She turned startled eyes on him, then laughed at her own folly, blaming tiredness and her own over sensitivity to the place for her unfamiliar edginess. ‘I suppose I am being silly,' she confessed, walking back towards him. ‘It was probably a trick of the light, but for a moment I thought—I thought I saw—someone. A person.' She laughed again to cover her embarrassment. 'It's this wild country, it's making me imagine things.'

'
Maybe,' he said, a smile wide on his good-natured face, 'or maybe you did see someone, but if you did it wouldn't do to go looking to see who it was; might be embarrassing, see? We'd best go back, miss, before some hefty quarryman comes after us with a balled fist.' His chuckle made its own explanations and she nodded understanding, recalling Evan Davies' ‘Wild Hills' and the passages that Owen Neath had referred to as 'earthy '.

Scarcely had they turned to move away, however, than she heard a sound behind them that sent her spinning round only a fraction of a second before Dai Hughes. A girl was watching them from the other side of the hedge of roses. She had a steady gaze that Helen found disturbing and her eyes were dark and deep-set with rings of grey below the bottom lids. She looked as if she had slept little of late and there was a glint of desperation in the deep eyes ,that aroused Helen's sympathy. Dai Hughes had known it was her moving about there in the shadows, of that Helen was sure, and he shook his head slowly at her: Small white teeth bit into a full lower lip painfully and she looked as if she would have cried.

She could have been no more than twenty or twenty-one, but there was such an air of sadness about her that one wondered how anyone so young could have suffered so much sadness. Dai Hughes was looking at her, his blue eyes soft with pity for her. ‘Not yet, Miss Owen,' he said softly. 'I’m sorry, love.' The dark head nodded her thanks and she would have moved away slowly, almost reluctantly, but Dai called out to her, as if only now remembering that Helen was there. 'Wait a minute!' he called to her, and she spun round, such hope in her eyes that Helen could almost feel it.

She came back more quickly than she had moved away and stood in front of them. 'This is Nurse Gaynor,' Dai Hughes told her. 'Miss, this is Tracey Owen.'

‘Nurse
Gaynor?’ Her voice was soft and almost without accent, more like Emlyn's than Dai Hughes’. 'You’re here to look after Emlyn?’ she asked.

Helen nodded. 'Yes, I am, Miss Owen.'

The dark eyes pleaded with her. 'Is—is he going to get better? Will he walk again?’ It was difficult in the face of such anxiety to exercise professional caution, but Helen answered as any nurse or doctor would have done.

'
There’s every reason to think he will, Miss Owen, in time. Are you a friend of his?’ If she was, Helen thought, why had she not come to the house and made her enquiry in a more orthodox way? The anxiety in the dark eyes was real enough and Dai Hughes was obviously in sympathy with her, so why the rather surreptitious way of finding out how Emlyn was faring? Unless, of course, Evan Davies forbade visitors to the house; such a move on his part would not surprise her.

'I was a friend before—before this happened.’ There was regret, sorrow and a hundred other emotions in the words and Helen felt suddenly the oppression of unspeakable pity as she looked at the slight figure disconsolately drooped as if she was too weary even to stand, and the dark, deep set eyes so full of hurt. 'I was the one who did it; I crashed the car, and I wasn’t even hurt.’ No one could have condemned her more hardly than she condemned herself, and she turned and moved away again before Helen could recover sufficiently to speak again. When she would have called her back again, Dai Hughes' hand on her arm dissuaded her.

'Better not, miss,' he advised. 'She’ll be back, she comes often in the evenings to find out how he is, see, an' I reckon I don't do nobody harm by telling her.' He spoke defensively and Helen wondered how much he risked his employer's wrath to keep the girl informed. Obviously she was forbidden the house or her tactics would not have been necessary.

'
Of course you don't,' Helen agreed. 'Isn't she allowed to see him at the house ?'

Dai shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'Mr Davies blames her, see, especially when she come out of it with only a few bruises; it was a miracle how she escaped, and they do say as she wasn't to blame for the accident, but Mr Davies won't have it, so he won't let her near Emlyn.'

‘But doesn't he want to see her—Emlyn, I mean? Surely he knows whether she's to blame or not?' Helen was appalled that one man should exercise so much power over people's lives, it was so unfair and positively feudal. Dai Hughes shrugged.

'
He used to ask about her one time,' he said, 'but since he knows Mr Evan don't want her here he doesn't bother any more.' He half, smiled as he walked beside her back along the paths to the house through the gathering dusk. 'Mr Emlyn knows better than to argue and he don't go short of pretty girls when he's well.' He glanced at her from the comer of his eye and Helen thought that the last words possibly held a warning for herself.

‘It's despicable to treat any girl like that,' she said. 'She's obviously very fond of him, it must be awful for her to be cut off and forbidden to see him like that.' She looked at him with a ghost of a smile. ‘It's lucky she has a friend at court,' she told him quietly. 'You're very good to risk your job like you do to help her a little, Mr Hughes.'

'I don't do much,' he said, but his smile showed that he was gratified by her praise, 'but I'd ask you not to let anybody know, miss. Not that I'm exactly scared, see, but it don't do to look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say, an' I'm very nice and comfortable here, helping to look after Mr Emlyn.
I
feel sorry for Tracey Owen, though, she's a nice enough girl an’ she's took it badly about him being broken up the way he is. Still,' again he gave her that oddly significant sideways glance, 'it don't do to get involved with the Davies when you're a woman, they don't never seem to 'ave much luck.'

There was something about his words added to the already uneasy sense of dejection that had been with her ever since dinner. There was something about Glyntarrach that she could not define, but it gave her no comfort to remember that she would probably have to live here for at least a number of weeks and perhaps longer. She looked along the path to the house and saw that there was now a light in the room where she had left Evan Davies.

As she walked in silence with Dai Hughes, she felt a tingle of panic rise in her heart at the thought of all the evenings she would be obliged to suffer the same chilly tolerance that she had tonight and she sighed. 'Tired, miss?' her companion asked, and she nodded.

'I suppose I am,' she admitted. 'Everything seems larger than life and at the moment I'm not looking forward to staying here very much.' She laughed at her own words when she saw his brows arch in query. ‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean it at all personally, Mr Hughes, it's just that it all seems a bit overwhelming at present. I expect I'll get used to it in time.'

The sun shining into the long room the following morning made Helen's pessimism of the night before seem foolish and she sighed her relief as she felt the bright warmth on her face as she looked out of the window. Glyntarrach, she told herself, was just an old house in the shadow of a mountain that perhaps dominated it to the point of being overpowering.

She had risen early, but Mrs Beeley was already up and Emlyn had been ready for his breakfast when she looked in on him, so she had attended to him first and left’ him for a while to seek her own breakfast. She found the little housekeeper vastly better company than Evan Davies had been and they talked about a host of things as they sat at their meal in the big white-walled kitchen. Mrs Beeley had been a little dubious about her eating with her in the kitchen, but Helen had said that she would like to and short of being outright rude to her, there had been no choice.

She had heard the story of Emlyn's accident, though from a slightly biased angle, she suspected. Mrs Beeley too blamed Tracey Owen, though whether it was really her own opinion based on known facts or whether it was merely an echo of her employer's bitter resentment, she could only guess, but she suspected it was the latter. In view of the woman's blind admiration of her employer, Helen kept a discreetly still tongue about her own impressions.

As Mrs Beeley told it, it was over a month ago now that Emlyn and the girl had been driving back from a dance in Gllanmerran in the early hours of the morning and a lorry had appeared out of a side road unexpectedly. The speed of the car had been such that there was no chance of her being able to brake in time to avoid a collision, so she had turned on to the grass verge at the edge of the roads but her strength had not been sufficient to hold the car against the bump when they mounted the grass and they had overturned. Tracey herself had been thrown clear, but Emlyn had been trapped and injured in such a way that it would take months of careful nursing and exercise to enable him to walk again.

It was a sad story and all too familiar, and Helen could sympathize to a certain extent with Evan Davies' bitter view of the accident, but the memory of the girl's dark-ringed eyes and sad face still stayed with her and she found it hard to believe that she was entirely to blame, even from hearing Mrs Beeley's version of the accident.

For the sake of convenience and because of the smallness of the family and staff, only one of the big downstairs rooms was used and this had been furnished as both sitting room and dining room, with several armchairs at the window end and near the fireplace. It was a lovely room and, as Evan Davies did, Helen found the view from the windows irresistible. She stood now in the deep curve of the bay, looking small and neat in her uniform with the tiny cap hiding only a minimum of her hair which shone like gold silk in the sun.

She was so engrossed in her admiration of the view that she failed at first to hear anyone come into the room and then started guiltily, turning to see Evan Davies over by the mantel over the fireplace. He picked up a pipe and came across to where she stood, bending over the low table where the jar of tobacco stood. 'Good morning, Mr Davies.' She was determined to start off her first full day at Glyntarrach in a friendly way if it was at all possible. She was not a, hasty-tempered girl and she hated an atmosphere of unrest and tension. At least, she felt, she had made her contribution to better relations this morning.