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A fraction of her mind registered the sudden rush of sheep down the ramp to freedom; felt the press of panicking woollen bodies getting in her way as she stumbled through them. Heard the collie give tongue, and Ben call out something to him, and then she was by Reeve's side. He lay on his face, his arms outstretched, and regardless of the others Marion dropped on to her knees in the dust of the yard, her trembling hands frantically seeking to torn him over.

'Reeve! Reeve, darling,' she sobbed. 'Oh God, don't let him be hurt, I can't bear it!' Tears streamed down her face, blinding her eyes, and she cradled him in her arms, stroking his hair, his face. 'Oh, Reeve, my heart, my love!' The salt of her own tears, wet on his forehead, stung her lips as she pressed diem in anguished entreaty on his brow. Someone knelt on her other side, stiffly, as if getting down was an effort, and Dick Blythe's voice penetrated her distress, calm, soothing, and infinitely reassuring.

'It caught his shoulder, not his head. He'll not be badly hurt, I think.'

And then, unbelievably, Reeve stirred. She felt new life flow through his limbs, energise his body, and grasping her for support he sat up. Had he heard what she said? There was no way she could tell.

'Don't cry, Marion,' he spoke quietly, but his voice was strong, and firm. 'I'm only bruised. It floored me for a moment, that's all.' So he had not completely lost consciousness, which meant he must have heard her. And this time he must have known she was not acting a part....

She sat back on her heels and looked at him, as if she could never look enough. It did not matter if he had heard her, understood what she said. She no longer cared. Her pride was gone, and nothing mattered now except that he was alive, unhurt. His face was chalk white, but her clearing vision saw that it was the pallor of anger rather than injury. She put out a tentative hand to help him as he got to his feet, but he gave a brief shake of his head, and she desisted and let her arm drop to her side again as he stood unaided, and began slowly to brush himself down.

It were an accident....' Aaron Wade seemed to have shrunk. He shuffled towards Reeve, his eyes looking anywhere but at the man he had tried to injure, and all his bluff and bluster had vanished.

'Dad didn't mean it, Mr Harland.'

'He meant it, and you know it.' Reeve stopped brushing and straightened up, then looked at the father and son, and the quietness of his tone belied the steel that lay underneath. 'What's more, I've got two witnesses to prove it,' he went on, and nodded towards Dick Blythe and Marion, and his voice dripped ice.

'What'll you do?' Ben's voice was fearful.

'I'll have to consider what to do.' Reeve was uncompromising, and Marion felt almost sorry for the youth. She remembered Reeve's terms to herself: no quarter given on either side. 'Come on, Marion, I've delivered Dick's letter, there's no need for us to stay here any longer.'

'You've dropped your wallet, Mr Harland, don't go without it,'

'I'll pick it up,' Marion offered immediately. Dick Blythe's back was stiff with years, and she could reach the ground more easily than he could. Quickly she stooped and gathered up the scattered contents of the soft leather holdall. A bankers' card—business cards—a gold-embossed one said, 'Harland and Son, Contractors,' so it was Reeve's own firm he worked for. His own, and his father's. She put the card back in its place. The knowledge did not matter any longer. It seemed totally unimportant beside the last item she picked up from the dust of the yard, and replaced with infinite care in the fold of the wallet from where it had fallen.

She knew it had come from there, because the imprint of it still remained in the fine leather. The imprint of a rosebud. An old-fashioned tea rose, plucked from the walled garden behind the Fleece. The same bud, she felt sure, that Reeve had worn in the lapel of his jacket the first night of his stay with them, from the vase full she had picked, and put in his room.

She handled it tenderly, and surreptitiously pressed it to her lips before she gently replaced it and closed the wallet And looked up to find Reeve was watching her, his gaze probing her face. He saw her action, saw she had recognised the bud for what it was, and—she caught her breath, and her eyes searched his face—why he had kept it there? And she knew, with absolute certainty, that he had heard and understood every word she spoke while he lay on the ground.

The
public enquiry was over in a much shorter time than Marion would have believed possible.

She did not see Reeve on his own again, after they left the farm, and before the meeting began. Dick Blythe overrode his protestations that he was perfectly capable of driving, and insisted on taking over the wheel on their return journey, although Reeve firmly rejected any suggestion that he should visit the hospital on the way back and have his injured shoulder attended to.'

'I should know if there was anything broken.'

'You made me go.' Fear for him made Marion angry.

'That was different.'

'How like a man!'

She subsided into the back seat of the car, simmering with silent resentment. But if she argued, he might reject Dick Blythe's offer to drive them back, and do more harm than good, and she dared not risk that happening, however much she wished they could be on their own. If the fanner had not been with them, Reeve might have explained the presence of the rosebud in his wallet. Again, he might not, and then her agony of indecision would have been even worse.

'I can't understand Aaron Wade,' Dick Blythe kept up a running conversation while he drove. 'He always was a stubborn man, but to have someone offer him a good price for the poor sort of holding he farms, and replace it with a place that's more fertile, and more profitable, even if it isn't much bigger—well, I reckon he must be out of his mind,' he ejaculated disgustedly.

So that was Reeve's connection with Dick Blythe's farm. He had not bought it for himself, but as an inducement to entice Aaron Wade to move.

'It wouldn't take much to win young Ben over,' the retiring farmer opined. 'He's not a bad sort, for all he takes after his father with his awkward ways. I reckon he can see the chance of a better return for his work if they take over my place, and there'd be a bit more company for him in Merevale at the end of the day, too.'

'What about Zilla Wade?' Reeve questioned.

'She'd move like a shot, if you ask me,' Dick Blythe answered without hesitation. 'She's duty bound to uphold her husband, of course,' he added sagely, 'but what woman wouldn't exchange an old-fashioned, tumbledown farmhouse, miles from anywhere, and with no mod cons to speak of, for a place like mine that's built next the lane, and within reach of a bus service. The house has been modernised inside with electric light and running hot and cold water too, and I bear they're bringing the gas out to those new council houses they're building, so that'll be another facility Merevale will have to offer, if they want it. It's Aaron you've got to convince, not his family,' their self-appointed chauffeur concluded not very hopefully.

'He's just given me a lever that might help me to do just that,' said Reeve, and rubbed his bruised shoulder with a thoughtful hand, and once again Marion saw the heavy wooden ramp crashing down. Would Reeve use the threat of reprisals for his action against Aaron Wade to force
hi
m to agree to the exchange of farms, and so clear the last serious obstacle from the path of the reservoir?

She had no opportunity to ask him. The moment they stopped on the forecourt of the Fleece Willy hastened out of the door to meet them and whisked Reeve away without preliminary.

'You're wanted at a Council meeting this evening, and a joint meeting with the water authorities tomorrow morning. You'll just have time to make it, if you go right away.'

Reeve turned to wave as Willy drove him away, but her uncle and Mrs Pugh were standing on the step beside her, to see them off, so she could not regard his gesture as being especially for her benefit.

He was gone for two days, each of which seemed like a lifetime to Marion. The phone rang and she fled to answer it, but it was Willy on the end of the line, not Reeve.

'He asked me to let your uncle know about the public enquiry meeting. Miles promised to let him have a room for the purpose.'

Marion took down the details with numb disappointment, If only Reeve himself had rung! There was no reason why he should, except the inexplicable presence of a tiny cream rosebud, pressed into the soft leather of his wallet, which he took from the inside top pocket of his jacket— the pocket next to his heart.

'Reeve's still stuck at that meeting with the Council people and the Water Authority officials,' Willy's cheerful voice informed her. 'Rather him than me. It's been going on for hours.'

'When do you expect to be back?'

'The day after tomorrow, in time for the public enquiry. We'll be coming with the people who are at the meeting now.'

'Saturday, about four o'clock.' Marion took down the details mechanically, as she would take any ordinary booking for rooms at the hotel.

Another day and a half before she saw Reeve again. And then he would be with a party of strangers. The time stretched like an eternity before her. She took Gyp for a walk, but she dared not go far for fear of over-straining her ankle. And besides, while she was away, Reeve might ring.

He did not, and she wandered restlessly to her studio and started to work on her woodcut, but she could not concentrate, and gave it up with a sigh of impatience, and wandered restlessly back again to stare out of the window at the perpetually empty road, along which Reeve would not come until the day after tomorrow.

All time passes, however slowly, and eventually Saturday afternoon arrived, and with it Reeve and Willy. Half a dozen other men were with them, sober-suited and carrying briefcases, obviously representatives of the interested authorities, but Marion saw and heard only Reeve.

She heard him speak, even before he came through the door. The party of men were all talking at once, but Reeve's voice reached her through the general babble of conversation, clear and distinct, like a clarion call, and her heart raced. Suddenly, now he was here, she felt nervous. Had she read too much into the fact that he carried one of the rosebuds she picked for his room? Her aunt had been a keen gardener, wont to take cuttings of plants that took her fancy and then forget about them, and find them about her person when they were dried and wilted and usually beyond saving so far as getting them to grow was concerned. Perhaps Reeve was like that? He had mentioned he was fond of roses, and the bush that grew in the walled garden was an old-fashioned variety, with a particularly sweet perfume, that would probably be unobtainable from a nursery now. Perhaps he kept the bud to remind him to ask for a cutting before he left the Fleece?

Then the door opened and Reeve stood there. He seemed to dwarf the other men in the party. He had on the same steel grey suit that he wore the first evening he was with them, but this time—her eyes flew to his jacket lapel— there was no rosebud there. She knew a sense of sickening disappointment, which was ridiculous because the roses in the walled garden were over now until their second blooming in the autumn, but his jacket lapel looked bare without the bud, empty—as empty as her heart felt, in its confusion and uncertainty.

She raised her eyes to his face, but she could not read the expression there in the subdued light of the low-ceilinged hall He had seen her. His eyes swept the hall when he came in and rested on her where she stood against the stairs. She caught her breath, and her heart thudded until she was certain he must hear it. He moved, as if he might come towards her, and her hand rose to her throat to still the wildly throbbing pulse that beat there until it felt as if it would choke her. Then one of the other men in the party spoke to Reeve, asked him a question, and he turned aside to answer it, while Marion leaned back against the newel post of the stairway, drained and shaken as if she had been driven by a mighty storm.

She watched in a daze as he disappeared with the rest of the party into the room prepared for the meeting, and Jim the barman propped open the outside door to give easy access to the steady stream of people who began to arrive to join them. A buffet table had been prepared at the back of the room, with a huge urn of tea supervised by Mrs Pugh, and Marion slipped on to a chair near the door as the meeting began. One of the strangers chaired it, and stilled the buzz of talk by his brief opening preamble, only to set it off again by his straightforward invitation for the people present to voice their objections to the proposed reservoir plan, or to put any questions they might have regarding Reeve's discussions with them, and the offers he had made.

Marion listened with a sense of growing unreality as the meeting progressed. There were few serious objections, not even, she realised with surprise, from Aaron Wade, who sat between his wife and son in subdued silence. Reeve had done his work well. The compensation he offered must have been very good, or the reasons he put forward for the people concerned to move home overriding, to have such an effect on a gathering which Marion had anticipated would be stormy, to say the least.

She felt no bitterness at Reeve's success, not even when, by an adroit remark, he prevented her from taking any effective part in the discussion. The Chairman's glance roved round the room, seeking someone to make the first contribution, and his eye stopped at Marion.

'Miss Dorman?' he invited.

'Miss Dorman is only in Fallbeck on a prolonged visit to relatives,' Reeve put in before she could speak. 'She's not a permanent resident.'

A small spark of rebellion glowed inside her for a moment, then it died down, and she made a hopeless gesture and shook her head. She could not fight any more, because it meant fighting Reeve, and she made no comment when the Chairman said,

'In that case, Miss Dorman's interest can only be academic,' and he passed on to the next nearest.