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She listened to them all with a sort of detached wonder.

The postmistress. 'I've got to go and live in Dale End anyway. Our Brenda's having her third, and she's written to say she can't manage on her own.'

And John Cornish. He had lost his haunted look, she realised suddenly, and seemed relaxed, and somehow eager. 'I've received an offer to second the headmaster at Merevale school for the last eighteen months until I retire. It came out of the blue, and it's much too good an offer to refuse.'

It had not come out of the blue, Marion thought shrewdly, remembering the remark made by the councillor in the orange tin helmet. Reeve had had a hand in this. Showing that after all, he cared, for the people of the valley as well as for his reservoir. A small, warm spot touched her frozen heart at the thought, an oasis of comfort in her desert of uncertainty.

The wife of one of the quarrymen, one of the two brothers who looked after their father's holding as well as doing their own jobs during the day, finally summed up the general feeling when she said,

'Well, you can do what you please, but we've accepted one of those houses with a bungalow attached. It'll give Dad a bit of garden to keep him happy, our men will be nearer to their work, and the children will be able to go to school without the dread of being boarded out with strangers every winter, once they're over eleven years old. And my friends are coming too, for that reason,' she nodded to the mothers of the two sets of twins.

'That really only leaves Mr Wade to comment,' the chairman said mildly, with a questioning look at Aaron.

It left her uncle as well, Marion thought, and wondered why that did not rouse her. She should be battling for him, for the Fleece, but he had sat at the side of the room close to Mrs Pugh, and remained silent throughout the whole of the meeting. Neither he nor the housekeeper offered to say a word. She was about to speak up, whether Reeve wanted her to or not, when Zilla Wade shrilled to her husband,

'Well, say your piece!' She nudged a reluctant Aaron to his feet, and when he did not immediately comply she administered a further prod which drove him into speech.

'I ain't got no objections,' he muttered unwillingly, but clearly enough for all to hear. 'The arrangement we came to is O.K with me.' And he sat down again hurriedly, leaving his wife and son with satisfied smiles on their faces, which confirmed Dick Blythe's guess that they, at least, were more than ready to exchange farms, and Marion's suspicion that Reeve had brought pressure to bear on Aaron that he dared not resist in view of his recent dangerous lapse of behaviour.

'Who'd have thought all this would have happened, and in such a short time, too?'

Rose, their daily help, collected cups of tea for herself and her husband as the meeting broke up into chattering groups, and turned cheerfully to greet Reeve as he strolled across the room to join them.

'The day I spilled your papers out of that slippy plastic folder thing, and had to take diem in to Miss Marion to put them right again for you ... here, have my cup of tea, I haven't drunk out of it, I'll get myself another.' With hardly a pause for breath Rose pressed her refreshment on Reeve, helped herself from the urn, and carried on talking. 'And then I came back upstairs with your hanky, you know, the one you put round Miss Marion's wrist where she'd cut herself, and heard you both quarrelling about the reservoir. Well, I said to my husband here, when he got home that night, who'd have thought it? I said.'

'It caused quite a stir,' her husband remembered with a grin. 'We'd got a houseful that night, too, being our son's eighteenth birthday, and they were all valley folk there. It made them prick their ears up, I can tell you.'

Marion looked straight at Reeve. She met his eyes, and her own were unflinching. For the first time since she had known Rose she felt glad of her garrulous tongue.

'I didn't break my promise,' she told him quietly. Even if she never saw him again after tonight, it was important he should know she had not broken her promise to him to keep silent about his plans.

'I know.'

Rose turned to greet a crony, pulling her husband with her, and Reeve and Marion were alone. In the crowded room, with a press of chattering people around them, she felt as if they were on a desert island. The grey of his eyes was the cool water surrounding them, tempting her to immerse in their clear depths. She drew a long, shuddering breath.

'I never seriously thought you did,' he went on, equally quietly. 'I was angry at the time. Will you forgive me?'

What had she got to forgive him for? It was all over now. She started to speak, but other people invaded the solitude of their island. People who, now the meeting was over, wanted to go home and attend to other things. The Council men and the Water Authority officials closed their briefcases and came over to shake hands with Reeve, congratulating him on a mission successfully accomplished, and then they, too, left, and besides herself and Reeve there were only Miles Dorman and Mrs Pugh.

'You didn't say anything at the meeting.' Belatedly Marion remembered her uncle's puzzling silence. 'What about the Fleece?' she asked him.

'We don't really want it any more.' Miles Dorman dismissed his hotel with calm indifference. 'Stella and I have decided to go and live in Dale End,' he smiled across at his housekeeper. 'We intend to be married quietly ....'

Married? Stella? Marion felt her senses whirl. With a vague feeling of astonishment she realised this was the first time she had heard Mrs Pugh's Christian name.

'Your uncle will have access to a good library to help him with his writing,' the housekeeper's calm voice brought her back to earth again. 'There's a place for sale within easy walking distance of the library, and we've been given the first option. It's got a bit of orchard and paddock attached, so there'll be space enough for Gyp to run, and no chance of him getting into mischief among the sheep.'

'Congratulations!' Reeve brought her to her senses, and a sense of what was expected of her.

'I'm so glad. I'd no idea ....' She flung her arms round her uncle, then round Mrs Pugh. She was glad for them. She only wished her heart would not cry so loudly. 'If only it was me!'

'The young are curiously blind,' Miles Dorman observed in his gentle voice. 'Come, my dear. Rose will clear up in here for you.' And he armed Mrs Pugh—no, Stella, thought Marion half hysterically—out of the door, and back to their own private quarters.

'And then there were two.'

He had said that before. Only this time she did not feel afraid. Her arms rose as he clasped her closely to him, and she ran soft fingertips through his hair, tracing the line of it where it curled into the nape of his neck, while her lips responded hungrily to his kisses.

'I love you. I love you,' he murmured, and never had her ears heard a sweeter sound. 'Tell me you love me— again,' he begged, and his eyes were dark with the intensity of his feeling.

'I told you when I thought you were unconscious,' a light of happy teasing lit her eyes. 'I tried to tell you, that day at the waterfall,' she remembered it as if it was another lifetime. 'You wouldn't let me speak. You shouted at me, in the helicopter.' She drew his head down closer to her own, and forgave him with her lips.

'I was terrified,' he confessed softly. 'I knew you'd fallen over the edge of the waterfall, and I couldn't find you. I thought I'd never see you again.'

He smoothed hands that suddenly trembled across her pale gold hair, and his lips became urgent with remembered fear, parting her own, but tenderly, seeking, pleading, fired by her response with a passionate urgency that would not be denied.

'You kept your rosebud.'

When his lips became weary at last, she leaned her head against his shoulder, and remembered the empty lapel.

'I kept it because it reminded me of you.' He traced an exploring finger against the softly rounded outline of her cheek, stroking the delicate bloom that glowed under his touch with the rose of happiness.

'How long have you known?' She turned glowing eyes to his.

'From the time I first saw you on the fellside,' he confessed. 'Why else do you think I followed you home, to see where you went, then dragged Willy all out here to stay at the
Fleece,
just so that I could get to know you?'

'You didn't tell me.' If only she had known I But she knew now, and that was all that mattered.

'I thought you'd hate me, because of the reservoir.'

'I tried to tell myself I did.'

'You told me you loved me, when you thought I couldn't hear. Bless Aaron Wade and his lorry ramp,' he said contentedly, and smilingly kissed the soft, shy flush that deepened the rose of her cheeks, and traced with his lips the curve of her downbent lashes.

'When will you marry me?' he demanded, and tipped gentle fingers under her chin, turning her face up to his.

'Soon. Let it be soon.'

'It'll mean travelling, because of my work.' His face clouded suddenly. 'I couldn't bear us to be parted.'

'I'll come with you, wherever you go.' She would go to the ends of the earth, with Reeve.

'I love you so,' he groaned, and strained her to him with a passionate embrace, holding her close against his heart, while he buried his face in the gold, silky mane of her hair, and Marion closed her eyes, and gave herself up to a moment that would last for them both, for ever.

The lowering sun peeped benignly through the windows, tinting all it touched with gold. It smiled on the two figures, now blended into one, and sent their soft shadow across the carpeted room. And they were both too preoccupied to notice that the shadow lay behind them.