LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      THE bright sunshine of early May, pouring through the latticed windows of the old house, shone on to the short dark curls of the girl bent over the case she was packing with a kind of controlled ferocity.

      She was young, built on Junoesque lines, and tall with a lovely face and dark eyes heavily fringed with black lashes. The face was marred at the moment by her heavy frown.

      ‘I cannot think what Granny is about,’ she observed to the middle-aged lady—an older, gently faded version of herself sitting and watching her. ‘Mother, she is eighty years old; why on earth does she want to go trekking across the Highlands of Scotland…?’

      ‘Not trekking, Rosie—she won’t have to move from the train if she doesn’t wish to!’ Mrs Macdonald heaved a sentimental sigh. ‘I think it is rather touching that she should want to see the surroundings of her childhood.’

      ‘Well, she won’t see much from the train.’ Rosie then added because of her mother’s unhappy look, ‘Well, if it makes her happy. But why me? There’s Aunt Carrie…’

      ‘Your granny and Aunt Carrie don’t get on, dear. It is only for a week, and I dare say there will be some interesting people on the train.’ She paused. ‘Aren’t you going to take the cream jersey? You look so nice in it, and it doesn’t take up any room…

      ‘Anyway, you never know,’ continued her mother vaguely, and Rosie, guessing her parent’s thoughts, said baldly,

      ‘There will be Americans on the train, Mother, and possibly a German or two, all married and over fifty.’

      ‘Oh, I do hope not,’ said Mrs Macdonald. She had never quite understood why Rosie, at twenty-five, was still unmarried. She was as pretty as a picture, had any number of friends and, to her mother’s knowledge, had turned down—in the nicest possible manner—several offers of marriage.

      ‘Don’t you want to get married?’ she voiced her thoughts out loud.

      ‘Oh, yes, Mother, dear. But I haven’t met him yet…’

      ‘There was that nice Percy Walls,’ said Mrs Macdonald.

      ‘Pooh!’ replied Rosie strongly. ‘He only talked about food and how clever he was. If I had married him I would have been a doormat, everlastingly cooking snacks.’

      ‘He did like his food,’ conceded Mrs Macdonald, ‘but he was keen on you, darling.’

      ‘Just because I can cook.’ Rosie rolled up a pleated skirt in a ruthless fashion, and stuffed it into her case. ‘Very surely being keen isn’t enough, Mother. The man I marry must dote on me, cherish and love me for always, even when I’m bad-tempered or sneezing my head off.’ She closed the case, and added briskly, ‘I don’t imagine there is such a man…’

      ‘He sounds worth waiting for,’ said Mrs Macdonald. ‘I must admit that a man’s love can be tried to the utmost when one has a heavy cold. Though I must say that your father is an exception.’ She sounded a little smug, and Rosie laughed and dropped a kiss on her mother’s cheek as she went to the dressing-table. ‘Mother, Father is the nicest man I know… How much money shall I need to take, do you think?’

      ‘Your granny said not to take any, but I think you had better take some; she forgets sometimes. Are you not looking forward to this trip at all, love?’

      ‘Well, it will be nice to be in Scotland again, only a week isn’t long enough—I’d love to stay up in the Highlands for a long time, walk perhaps, or drive around. But I’ve only got two weeks’ holiday, and Miss Porter wants to go away in June, so I’ll have to be there to do some of her work.’

      Rosie had spoken cheerfully; she disliked her job as a shorthand typist at Messrs Crabbe, Crabbe and Twitchett, the leading solicitors in the small country town in Wiltshire where she lived, but she had never said so; her father had lost almost all of his capital some years previously when the shares he held became almost worthless, and in order to keep his home in Scotland intact he had handed it over to a cousin and taken the job of agent on a large estate in Wiltshire. Neither he nor her mother had ever complained, although Rosie knew that they missed their home as much as she did. She had set about learning shorthand and typing, got herself a job, and consoled herself with the thought that their home in Scotland was, at least, still in the family.

      Her grandmother lived in Edinburgh with her unmarried daughter who was older than Rosie’s father—a wispy lady who was seldom able to complete a sentence, and was possessed of a meekness

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