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“If you say so, then I’m sure it’s quite true. Aunt Gina,” Anthony said, though the lack of conviction in his voice belied the statement. “But I’ve got a point of view as well. From what I’ve seen, people in love rarely have any idea of what their future partner is like. Love
is
blind! I’ll go as far as that with the poets. Well, that won’t do for me! I want to go into this—if I go at all— with my eyes wide open. And what’s more, I’ll marry no woman who can’t do the same thing. I want a wife who knows my failings as well as any virtues I may possess, and if I can’t have one on those terms, then I won’t have one at all! Is that quite clear?”

“Perfectly,” Mrs. Trevose said with a little sigh. “You couldn’t have made it clearer. Well, how do you intend setting about finding her?”

“I’ve no idea—perhaps you can advise me,” Anthony suggested stiffly, rather as if he wasn’t sure whether she was laughing at him or not.

It was, indeed, with difficulty that Mrs. Trevose resisted the temptation of telling him that to put an advertisement into the local paper would be in keeping with his businesslike approach to marriage.

“I think if you accept a few invitations instead of refusing them all, people will realise that you want to be—friendly,” Fenella interposed quietly.

“Friendly!” He caught eagerly at the word. ‘Yes, that’s it, Fen! I haven’t been exactly friendly since I came home, have I? And now I realise that it’s made my life rather—unbalanced, I suppose is the word.”

“And I think it might be a good idea if we started the ball rolling by having a party,” Fenella went on levelly. “A garden party, perhaps. The roses should be at their best in a week or two, won’t they? So why not then?”

“Oh yes, of course,” Mrs. Trevose said quickly, starting a little as if she had been lost in thought. “They should be lovely. Shall we do that, Anthony?”

‘Yes,” he sounded relieved. “I loathe rooms filled to overflowing with people who never stop chattering. Besides, it doesn’t matter if a cup of tea gets accidentally spilled outside. You won’t look as agonized if the grass gets an unexpected bath as if one of your precious carpets did.”

“Your
precious carpets!” his aunt reminded him. “And you ought to be grateful for the care Fenella and I take of your belongings! ”

“I am,” he told her. “I don’t know what I’d do without you both!” There was genuine affection in his tone, but it brought no answering softness to Mrs. Trevose’s face.

“Well, you’ll have to get used to the idea of doing without us sooner or later,” she told him drily.

“Here, what on earth—?” He was genuinely startled, and Fenella’s lips quivered a little. He
did
care, even if it wasn’t the right sort of caring.

“My dear boy, you surely don’t imagine that we intend to stay here once you get married, do you?” Mrs. Trevose asked mildly.

He towered over her, grim-faced, a threatening, powerful figure.

“Now look here,” he said sternly. “Whether I get married or not has nothing to do with it. This is your home—yours and Fen’s, for as long as you want it to be!”

“Thank you, Anthony,” Mrs. Trevose said gravely. “But don’t you see, it might be very pleasant for us both to feel that we are free—to travel, for instance. Except for an occasional trip to London, it’s almost five years since I’ve been away from here. And it’s certainly time that Fenella saw something of the world! ”

“I hadn’t realised that you found it boring here,” he said stiffly. “I hope that you will always consider yourself absolutely free—”

“My dear Anthony, but of course!” Mrs. Trevose seemed blissfully unaware that she had hurt his feelings. “That was always the arrangement, wasn’t it? And I’m in no particular hurry, particularly as life should be a little more interesting for Fenella if we’re going to do some entertaining. Who knows but what she might not also—” she checked herself hastily as if she felt that she had been indiscreet. “Now—the exact date. The Saturday nearest to the middle of June—the fourteenth, I fancy, but we’ll check that.”

“All right,” Anthony said shortly.

“And now, whom shall we invite?” she queried brightly. “I expect you have your own ideas about that, Anthony. Fenella, can you get a pencil and some paper?” But Anthony had had enough. He had agreed to the general plan. The niggling details did not interest him.

“Look, be a dear. Fen, and make out the list,” he said hurriedly. “You know so much better than I do who should be asked. I’ll glance over it when it’s done, if you like.”

“Very well, Anthony,” Fenella promised—just as she always had done if he asked her to do something.

Mrs. Trevose snorted.

“All the fun and none of the worry! Just like a man!” she said indignantly. “What about the invitations?”

“Oh, have them printed!” Anthony was edging towards the door.

“Even then, the envelopes have to be addressed and the cards filled in—” But she was talking to the empty air. Anthony had vanished.

Mrs. Trevose sighed.

“Well, if we needed proof that Anthony is one of the nicest of men, we have it! ” she commented. “It’s only the not very pleasant ones that understand women, never the nice ones!”

Fenella didn’t reply. She carefully rolled up her table napkin and put it in its ring before saying, almost naturally:

“Unless you-want me to help you in the church, I’ll get on with the list at once—we haven’t too much time.”

“Yes, of course, dear,” Mrs. Trevose agreed. “I can manage quite well on my own.”

Fenella walked over to the door and then, with her hand on the knob, she turned.

“I think—it’s a lovely idea of yours that we might travel by and by,” she said in a bright, taut little voice. “You meant it quite seriously, didn’t you?”

“Certainly,” Mrs. Trevose said decisively. “There’s so much for you to see—France, Italy, the Scandinavian countries—”

“Lovely!” Fenella smiled, and closed the door gently behind her.

Mrs. Trevose had cut her flowers early with the intention of taking them to the church before the heat of the day, but none the less, she sat down at the table again for a considerable time, a thoughtful, troubled woman.

Poor gallant little Fenella, keeping her chin up in the face of the cruelest blow she could possibly have suffered! At that moment, in spite of her deep affection for him, Mrs. Trevose could have found it in her heart to hate Anthony, the unwitting cause of the child’s pain. For it was quite certain that he had no idea of the depth or quality of Fenella’s feeling for him. No one had except herself who had been almost a mother to the girl for so many years. And now she was wondering if she was to blame for the present situation—

For a long time it had been her dearest wish that the two people she loved best in the world should marry, though she’d always set her face against active matchmaking. She had told herself, in fact, that she was quite prepared to be disappointed since such a decision must be made by the two persons concerned and them alone. But what she had not anticipated was that one might fall in love while, to the other, the warm affection that there had always been between them remained a sufficient tie.

Had she, Mrs. Trevose asked herself anxiously, allowed her great love for Fenella to exert an unconscious influence? Such things could happen—

Fenella was the daughter of her only sister. Both she and her husband had died when Fenella was a very little child, and Hugh Trevose had willingly agreed that she should come to live with them. Having no children of their own, she came to mean everything to them, and when Hugh died, Gina often wondered if she could have gone on living but for the girl who shared her grief.

That was six years ago now, when Fenella had been sixteen. When Anthony had heard the news, he wrote not only to convey his sympathy but also to make a suggestion.

“Quite soon now I shall be coming home for good,'' he wrote. “And as you know, Lyon House has been let for some years. However, I have just heard from my present tenant that they don’t want to renew the agreement at the end of this year, which suits me excellently. Could you possibly consider taking the place over when they go so that there is a home waiting for me to come back to ? If you can see your way to make it your home, and Fen’s as well, bless her, nothing would please me more, but of course, you must be entirely guided by your own wishes. Perhaps you will cable your decision so that I can have everything handed over to you if you agree to the scheme.”

Almost without hesitation, Mrs. Trevose had cabled her willingness to fall in with Anthony’s plan. Fenella had been in a seventh heaven. She had known Anthony almost all her life and he had always been her hero. She loved Fairhaven, too, which she had visited many times, and had always felt completely at home there. It would be a very gentle, happy transplanting, Mrs. Trevose thought. And that mattered a lot, for Fenella was a shy, quiet girl, desperately diffident in the presence of people whom she didn’t know very well. She was very sweet, too, with that appealing unawakened charm of a very young girl. Surely, seeing her day by day, Anthony could not help but eventually fall in love with her!

But nothing of the sort had happened. Anthony had taken the young Fenella in hand as soon as he came home, and had coaxed, bullied or teased her into broadening her outlook and her activities. He had a lot of time for Fenella—but he hadn’t fallen in love with her, and now Mrs. Trevose felt that it was most unlikely he ever would.

*

Fenella went to the little room that was always referred to, somewhat grandiloquently, as her study. Actually, it was the room that, in his childhood, had been Anthony’s nursery. It was still decorated with a wallpaper depicting the adventures of John Gilpin, and fixed to the window frames were the metal sockets into which rods had been placed to prevent an adventurous young Anthony from tumbling into the garden below.

Fenella went over to the window and curled up on the padded window seat. From here one had a wonderful view of the rocky coastline to one side of the river estuary, and at present there was an additional interest in the form of an anchored ship off shore from which frogmen were diving. They were searching for the almost two-hundred-year-old wreck of a sailing ship which had gone down within sight of safety, and usually Fenella was fascinated by their activities. But this morning her thoughts occupied her so completely that she was oblivious to everything else.

It wasn’t easy to choke down the tears she would never shed in front of Anthony and face up to reality, but it had to be done, and Anthony himself had taught her to have the courage she so desperately needed now.

Anthony had been her whole life. He had taught her to handle a sailing boat until even he was satisfied with her degree of competence. He had coached her at tennis and golf and taken her dancing until she was a partner that any man would enjoy dancing with. And she had loved it all. But always she had known that while Anthony enjoyed these things for their own sake, it was sharing the pleasure with him that had counted with her. She would have been just as happy in a desert so long as he had been there.

“I’m rather a fraud,” she thought sadly. “All this isn’t really me. It’s Anthony—because I’m just a pale reflection of him! And perhaps he realises it! Perhaps he wants to find someone who is genuine—who likes the things he likes and is the sort of person whom he can respect—not one who just pretends!”

And yet wasn’t it natural to want to be the self the man one loves wants one to be? Fenella sighed and rested her head against the frame of the open window. For a time the tears slid unrestrained down her cheeks. Then, firmly, she wiped them away and went over to the lovely little Chippendale writing table that Anthony had given her for her twenty-first birthday. She took out a sheet of paper and her fountain pen from a drawer.

“GARDEN PARTY, JUNE 14th"
she printed, and framed the words with an intricate arabesque of swirling curves and lines.
“GUESTS,”
she added immediately below. And another, less ornate design. The Rector and Mrs. Enderby. Dr. and Mrs. Mallory. Captain Franks, because he was such a dear and flirted so nicely with Aunt Gina.

And so on until she had a list of over forty names, ending with that of Miss Prosser who was rather like the Wicked Fairy. She had to be invited because not to do so could make for more trouble than putting up with her presence.

Fenella read her list through and frowned. It was long enough, but so many of the people on it were middle-aged and married, and hardly any of them were girls who could possibly, from Anthony’s point of view, be called interesting.

Fenella wondered whether she had subconsciously refused to remember the names of girls who could be described that way, but really, there had been an unusual number of weddings recently. Anthony had finally rebelled at the number of times he had had to don morning dress and act as best man. And Linda Venn, the daughter of the local solicitor and the most recent of the brides, had complained that it was almost impossible to find anyone to act as her bridesmaids. Fenella herself had been greatly in demand. So much so, in fact, that Miss Prosser had warned her ominously: “Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride! ”

She racked her brains a little longer and then took the list down to Aunt Gina, who read it and agreed that it wasn’t very promising.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be a very dull affair,” she said regretfully. “It’s odd, isn’t it, how Fairhaven has changed during the time we’ve been here. It used to seem to me an unusually young, gay place.”

“That was when the Lancings were over at Poldean House,” Fenella said with a little sigh. “They used to do such a lot of entertaining themselves and it seemed to stimulate everybody else. Do you remember their Christmas and Hallowe’en parties? They were marvellous. I do wish they hadn’t gone away.”

“Yes—well, it’s no good wishing,” Mrs. Trevose said rather sharply for her. “Now, about the invitation—”

Between them they drafted the wording of the card to be used and Fenella announced her intention of taking it down to the village at once to put the order in hand.