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'I'm coming. I didn't realise I'd been so long.'

Her voice must have sounded normal enough, because the housekeeper's footsteps went off back downstairs, and Marion stripped off her sweater with hasty hands. It would not do for Mrs Pugh to come back and find she had not even started to change. She plucked a dress at random from her wardrobe. It was a high-necked, sleeveless leaf green linen, a perfect foil for her honey-gold hair. She subdued the latter into a smooth curtain with a hasty brush, slipped on a pair of white sandals, and ran downstairs before the older woman waxed impatient.

'Sorry I was so long.' Conscience reminded her she had offered to serve the guests' dinner herself, but Mrs Pugh did not seem put out by her delinquency.

'Don't worry about Mr Harland and his pilot,' she said comfortably, 'they're settled with their main course.'

Marion was not worried about them. Her last concern was for Reeve Harland's comfort, though it should be her first, she thought guiltily, since he was staying in her uncle's hotel.

'They seem a pleasant pair,' the housekeeper went on happily. 'They tell me they've parked their helicopter at the airport.'

'And parked themselves on us,' Marion observed sourly, if somewhat obscurely, through a mouthful of crisp Yorkshire pudding.

'Well, that's what we're here for, isn't it?' Mercifully Mrs Pugh did not seem to notice the ire in her voice, and she pulled herself up sharply. If she made her dislike of Reeve Harland too obvious, the housekeeper might want to know why, and Marion found it difficult enough to discover a rational explanation, even to herself. 'We're just not on the same wavelength,' she dismissed their dark-haired guest with a shrug, and concentrated on her meal.

'I'll take the sweet in.' Mrs Pugh cut generous portions of apple pie. 'You can look after their coffee while I give your uncle his meal.'

'Has the man come to look after the bar?' Someone would have to be on duty, it was past opening time, and she added hastily as she caught the housekeeper's look of surprise, 'I know I don't normally serve in there, I just hadn't heard Jim arrive, that's all.'

'He came while you were busy upstairs. I hope they like apple pie,' her companion returned to more immediate concerns.

'I'm sure Willy does,' Marion smiled. And Reeve Harland could either eat it or go without, she added silently to herself.

'I've told them you'll take their coffee into the drawing room in a quarter of an hour.' Mrs Pugh returned as Marion finished her own meal. 'Now I'll go and try to part your uncle from his encyclopaedias for long enough to eat his dinner,' she said without much hope in her voice.

'You go ahead, I'll clear the table in the dining room.' Conscience made Marion offer. If she put the coffee tray in the drawing room a few minutes before Reeve and Willy were ready to go in, as soon as they were safely installed she could return and clear the dining room table, and she need not come face to face with either of them.

The first half of her plan worked nicely. She had just deposited the coffee tray when her straining ears caught the sounds of exodus from the dining room. She slipped hurriedly back to the kitchen, thankful for once for the twist in the passage which hid her from sight, and as soon as the drawing room door closed she slipped out again with an empty tray in her hands, to clear the dinner table. The first intimation she had that the second half of her plan had gone awry was when Reeve spoke from behind her.

'I believe these are your property.'

It was a good job the tray of crockery was rested on the table, otherwise it would have gone the way of the cutlery earlier, with disastrous results. He must have returned to the dining room almost immediately. Perhaps he had forgotten something, maybe the evening papers. Willy had left them on one of the chairs. She drew a deep breath, and turned reluctantly to face him.

'Your sketching is very good.' Was he being condescending? Marion eyed him suspiciously, but he went on smoothly, 'Did we disturb the hare; as well as the artist?' So he recognised her drawing for what it was. He held it out to her, loosely rolled, and bound with something soft and brown. Her hair ribbon.

'How did you...?' Marion ignored his question and asked one of her own. How had he come to be in possession of her drawing and ribbon? The last time she had seen them, they were both floating downhill, pulled by the suction from the rising helicopter.

'Naturally I retrieved them for you,' Reeve told her coolly. 'Since it was our fault you lost them, it was up to us to get them back for you.'

'It was you who dropped from the helicopter?' Suddenly she remembered the machine hovering, and the dark figure descending from it. She swallowed convulsively, seeing again in her mind's eye the spider-thin thread by which he had hung. 'What a risk to take, for the sake of a sheet of paper, and a strip of velvet ribbon!' The words came out before she could stop them, but she could not help it. She shivered at the thought that anyone would go to such lengths for such a trivial reason.

'There was no risk.' He spoke with calm self-assurance, and Marion felt a mounting irritation with the man. His quixotic action had put her at a disadvantage, and what was worse, she was now under an obligation to him, and the feeling rankled. 'Though perhaps I should have left the velvet ribbon on the hill,' he eyed her speculatively, 'it seems a shame to confine such lovely hair.'

'It gets in my eyes when I'm sketching.' Marion coloured furiously. How dared he criticise her mode of dress!

'If you'd waited a little longer on the hilltop, you could have had it back right away.'

'There wasn't time—I had to get home, and it's a long walk.'

'Yes, we saw you go.' Saw her run away, like the frightened hare? Marion gritted her teeth and remained silent. 'Diana, striding the uplands,' he murmured, and her eyes sparked angrily.

'My name's Marion,' she snapped, and realised too late that she had given him just the information he wanted.

'Oh, you've cleared the table.' Mrs Pugh broke the tension, that felt to Marion as if it might snap with an audible crack. 'Of course,' the housekeeper clicked her tongue vexedly, 'you told me you would, I just forgot.' She bustled up to the table and the loaded tray. 'I might as well take this while I'm here, and you can fold up the cloth. Was there anything else you wanted, Mr Harland?' She looked enquiringly from Reeve to Marion, patently wondering what it was they had been talking about.

'Mr Harland returned my hairband. He found it,' Marion began. She looked straight at Reeve then, and her eyes begged him not to say where he found it, or how it came to be in his possession. There was no earthly reason why Mrs Pugh should not know, except that inexplicably Marion did not want to talk about it to anyone.

'That was nice,' the housekeeper raised the laden tray. 'I hope you've thanked him properly.' She never quite grasped the fact that Marion was no longer a leggy schoolgirl needing guidance.

'Thank you.' She faced Reeve as the door closed behind the older woman, and her stiffly formal tone expressed little gratitude. A strange light lit the grey eyes looking down at her.

'She didn't say just to thank me,' he reminded Marion softly, 'she said to thank me properly,' he emphasised.

Before she had time to realise what he was going to do he reached out and grasped her by the shoulders and turned her towards him. She raised her face in quick protest at his touch, and instantly his lips descended on hers, claiming, without asking, the extra thanks that he thought were his due.

Surprise
held her rigid for a second or two. Seconds in which a treacherous sweetness stole through her veins, electrifying her lips, and the touch of his hands on her shoulders. As if in a dream she felt herself respond, the rigidity leave her.

'No!' She wrenched herself free, felt the rosebud in his lapel brush her cheek as she twisted frantically free from his grasp, and gathering up the tablecloth in a crumpled heap in her arms, she whirled away from him and ran from the room. Willy appeared at the drawing room door as she rounded the corner of the passage.

'I wanted Reeve,' he began.

'You can have him!' choked Marion, and fled on until the kitchen door closed behind her, and she leaned against it gratefully, shaking in every limb, with the tablecloth still clutched to her as if to ward off she did not know what.

'Dearie me, that cloth'll be all crumples if you hold it like that.' Mrs Pugh came in and clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

'I was just going outside to shake it.' Marion grasped at the first excuse to enter her head.

'What for?' the housekeeper asked. 'There weren't any crumbs. They didn't eat their bread rolls.'

'I didn't notice—it won't matter then—I'll fold it.' Marion felt herself becoming incoherent, and she held the cloth high
,
stroking it back to smooth folds, and using it as a shield to hide her burning face. Fortunately the cloth was a large one, and her action did not look strange, as the length of it was as much as her arms could manage at one stretch. Reeve had been more than her arms could manage. His mocking laugh echoed in her head, taunting her. Why had she responded to his kiss like that? Her cheeks flamed at the memory. Anyone would think he was the first man who had kissed her. She had met many men in her travels, more than one had wanted to marry her, but with an instinctive caution Marion managed to remain unattached and curiously heartwhole for her twenty-five years. Applying the same philosophy which she used with Ben Wade, she preferred to remain aloof, contenting herself with the fulfilment her work offered until she should find the greater fulfilment which she knew life with the right man could hold for her. And Reeve Harland was definitely not the right man.

His stolen kiss amounted to an insult. Even the act of retrieving her drawing and her hair ribbon from the fell-side in such an unorthodox manner did not give him the right to presume so far. The thought gave her pause. In her desperate haste to get away from Reeve, she had left both the drawing and the hair ribbon behind her in the dining room. And if she went back to get them, she might encounter Reeve again.

'I'll get them in the morning.' She did not realise she had spoken out loud until Mrs Pugh answered her.

'Get what in the morning? There's nothing else for you to do here, so you can get whatever it is now.'

'I won't bother,' Marion answered hastily, 'it's only my hairband, I left it in the dining room.'

'And after Mr Harland took the trouble to return it to you,' the housekeeper reproached her. 'Though I must say I like your hair free myself, like you've got it now.'

Marion half hoped Mrs Pugh would offer to get the hairband for her, but she did not seem to have any further business in the dining room that evening, and when Marion went to look for her property the next morning it was not there. Neither was her drawing. She frowned, nonplussed, and then her face cleared. Perhaps their daily help had tidied it away. She was a great one for tidying things away.

'I expect it'll be on my bed,' Marion decided with relief. That was where their daily usually put odds and ends she could not identify, and left Marion to sort out their owners. Everything from a gold bracelet to half a gum-boot had found its way there dining the last twelve months. But when she went up to her bedroom to get ready to go out, neither the hairband nor the drawing had arrived yet.

'I won't bother with it now,' she answered Mrs Pugh's enquiry, 'I want to catch the post van into Dale End. Is there anything you need while I'm there?'

'There's a list of books your uncle wants from the library, and there's probably some due to go back.'

'I've got both,' Marion answered her, 'that's why I particularly want to go in today or they'll be overdue. And I need some new sketching pencils for myself.' She wanted only the one, and she would not have needed that, she thought with asperity, if it had not been for Reeve and his wretched helicopter. It did not strike her as illogical that she blamed only Reeve, and not Willy as well.

'I thought I saw Mr Harland,' the housekeeper began, and Marion interrupted her hastily. She did not want to hear about Reeve Harland, his movements held no interest for her, she told herself, except that she preferred them to be in the opposite direction to her own.

'I'll have to go, or I'll miss the post van. I saw him go down towards Wade's farm about twenty minutes ago.' There was no gainsaying her excuse,, if she missed the van her opportunity to go to Dale End would be irretrievably lost until the following morning. She ran down the Steps and paused on the bottom one. A sleek Rover was pulled up at the side of the street, and Willy and Reeve leaned against the bonnet, deep in discussion. They saw her and straightened to their feet just as she caught sight of the post van.

'Oh, wave him to stop for me!' The driver was evidently in a hurry, and her hesitation on the hotel step lost her the necessary precious seconds to attract his attention in time to pick her up. She let out a puff of relief as Willy obligingly waved, and the van driver slowed to a halt and leaned out to speak to him—and then stared with incredulous fury as Reeve deliberately sauntered to the van shaking his head, and actually motioned the driver to carry on. Which he did, without ado. Marion ran towards him, waving frantically, but the van driver could not have seen her, for he went serenely on his way, leaving her with an armful of heavy books, stranded by the side of the road.

'What did you send him off for?' she cried furiously, turning on Reeve. 'You knew I wanted him.'

'Because we can give you a much more comfortable ride into Dale End in the car.' He did not look in the least abashed.

'How do you know I want to go into Dale End? I might want to....'

'Because that's where the post van goes to,' he interrupted her confidently. 'There isn't anywhere else he could drop you.'

What he said was perfectly true. Just as it was true that the Rover would be infinitely more comfortable to ride in than the van. The post vehicle was like most basic amenities, indispensable, but still basic.