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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

ROMILLIE opened her eyes to a bright sunshiny morning and knew it was going to be a good day. Wrong! Well, perhaps not totally. Her mother, a poor sleeper, was already up and about when Romillie went down the stairs.

‘Any plans for today?’ Romillie asked gently. Eleanor Fairfax had suffered for some years with general low spirits and feelings of inadequacy, but of late there were more good days than bad.

‘If this weather holds I thought I might do a spot of weeding or…’ she hesitated ‘…I might take a sketchpad outside. ’

Romillie’s spirits soared. Her mother was a professional artist—portraits mainly. She was truly gifted but had not so much as picked up a sketching pencil in an absolute age.

‘The forecast is good,’ Romillie answered lightly, taking a quick glance at her watch and getting up and taking her cereal bowl over to the kitchen sink. ‘Better be off. Don’t want to be late. ’

It was not far to the dental practice where she worked. But because she liked to return home in her lunch hour, and since her mother had given up driving, Romillie made the journey in her mother’s car.

They lived in the village of Tarnleigh on the Oxfordshire and Berkshire borders. Her receptionist-telephonist job with Yardley, East, and—now—Davidson, was well within her capabilities. It was not a job she would have chosen to do, but it was convenient.

Five years ago she had intended to go to university.

She had been upset, her mother distraught. It had not ended there. They had always lived with Grandfather Mannion. Romillie’s father, despite his frequent absences, had lived with them, too.

Her mother had adored Archer Fairfax and had put up with his womanising, his idleness, his spendthrift ways, making excuses for him whenever Grandfather Mannion would frown in his direction.

Romillie had known her father had other women. She had seen him driving along one time with a pretty blonde by his side. And another time, when he was supposed to be in Northampton for a job interview, and she had been in the school coach some miles from home after playing in an away game hockey match, she had seen him arm in arm, with a brunette this time.

He had returned home the next day, having not got the job but related that, after a very detailed and extensive interview, it had been felt that he was too well qualified for the job. Her mother had swallowed it all and Romillie just hadn’t had the heart to tell her that he had been nowhere near a job interview.

But it became plain that Grandfather Mannion had been wise to his son-in-law in that when Archer Fairfax was of the opinion that he would now rule the roost, he discovered that his well-to-do father-in-law had left him not one penny. The bulk of his estate had gone to his daughter, Eleanor, with money left in trust for his granddaughter until she attained the age of twenty-five. The house, the large rambling house, had been left to Eleanor during her lifetime, or until she no longer required it, when it was then to be handed down to her daughter.