The next day it rained and the next and though the sky lightened a few times and the clouds rolled off to the tops of the mountains, they were blown back and the rain misted down for almost a week. Even Charles began to be irritable, to find excuses to get off to town. (To buy rubber boots, wool socks, so he said, but Violet knew that it was to get away into some small cosy pub and talk with the men. She could hardly blame him.) Violet felt panic rising in her and took refuge two or three times a day in the kitchen to drink a cup of tea with Annie, and the silent Maire in whose eyes she read the growing devotion which could alone give her back a sense of identity. The kitchen—she had always felt this even as a little girl—was the root of the house. All branched up and outward from it, and if the fire went out there could be no hope at all. But Annie saw to it that the fire never went out and that there was always a kettle at the boil and she knew the way to cheer up Miss Violet was to talk about the old days and people the empty rooms with the laughter and parties and people.

Then there was the post which the young postman’s boy brought up on a bicycle a little after eleven. This was the signal for Violet to get up and settle in the library to read her letters by the fire, and to answer them until lunch (for she had always been a lavish correspondent. One had to be to maintain relationships from such a distance as Burma or from this almost equally isolated world). On rainy days this rite replaced the other, of gathering and arranging flowers.

It was queer how she never saw a letter from America without trembling. So strong was the bond with her sister, a bond which all the years had neither pulled tighter into a real intimacy, or ever loosened even a fraction from its painful tension. She sat with the letter in her hands, aware that it was longer than usual, wondering what news it might bring.

When she had read it through, she lit a cigarette and went over to stand at her grandfather’s desk looking out at the wet leaves of the oaks, at the long sweep of rough grass, misted over by the fine rain. She was so startled that she had no thoughts, only rather violent and disconnected feelings. For Barbie had asked her point-blank to take her daughter Sally in for the summer, had intimated that the sooner Violet answered the better, and that a cable would be welcome. It seemed that Sally was at all costs to be removed from an emotional situation which Barbie and her husband did not wish to precipitate any further: she had fallen in love with an actor, a nice enough boy, Barbie said, with a Texas oil fortune in the background, but simply not to be trusted, much too sophisticated for Sally and, she was convinced, not serious. Whereas Sally, it appeared, was not only serious but determined to marry him at once; was behaving very much as her mother had behaved thirty years before (though Barbie had forgotten this, perhaps), was defiant, tearful, said she hated her parents and meanwhile was doing very badly at college. “I can’t pretend that I am asking an easy thing of you, Violet,” the letter had ended. “Sally will not want to come and I have never talked to her much about the house, but if you and Charles could bear to have her for a month or two, it might make all the difference to her future happiness.”

Violet’s first reaction had been “No, we’re hardly settled; we’ve got to have time; we can’t be expected to take on another problem right now.” Only her thoughts were not reasoned in this way, they were more violent. It looked like an invasion—an American girl, too, that seemed the last straw. And Barbie’s daughter, obviously difficult, emotional, God knew what. No, thought Violet, looking out at the drifting clouds which now seemed really to be blowing over…

Then she thought, after all, it will fill the empty spaces. Here’s a child we’re being asked to take in. Also, Charles … Always it made things easier rather than more difficult if there were other people about in their marriage. Violet knew that they each in his own way, responded to a third person.

And finally she knew that whatever other reasons there might be, she would have to say yes to Barbie. There was too much guilt to make her ever again able to take a stand where Barbie was concerned.

She’ll have my room, Violet thought, already filling it in her mind’s eye with roses, already opening her heart to this niece she had never seen. She went upstairs to try to find snapshots in a trunk she had not yet unpacked. There Charles found her, sitting on the floor with papers and letters strewn all around her, and in her hand the photograph of a little dark girl in boy’s clothes looking down from an apple tree like a mischievous elf.

“Whatever are you doing, Violet?” Charles was cross. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Didn’t you hear me call?”