Introduction

The girl with hair the colour of heather honey came out of the cottage into the thin, spring sunshine and paused before a bed of daffodils nodding in the breeze.

Behind her, a fitting background for beauty garbed in a cotton sun bonnet, the low house with its ancient thatch tanned to a dull brown by fifty years of storm and sunshine.

In front the garden in which Gladys Brooke took such a pride and delight. A typical old world cottage garden in which was set the house which dated back to the days of the Merrie Monarch.

Beyond that a sort of broad lane fringed by tall elms which straggled along until it reached the village street. A shop here and there, a public house in black and white, the smithy, and again the church, with the vicarage under its shadow fronting the Georgian residence of the doctor and again the entrance to the squire's domain...