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a connoisseur tastes fine wine.
    Something deep and unsuspected inside her came to life at the ardour of his touch. Emotions that until now had lain dormant, flowered into tender bloom as his lips began to wander, travelling over her eyes, closing each lid in turn, then passing on across the delicate blue veins of her throbbing temples, down across the slender line of her jaw, until they came to rest in the warm, pulsing hollow of her throat. Their touch acted like a golden key, releasing emotions that had lain prisoner for too long. She drew a long shuddering breath, and her arms rose, clasping him round his neck, her hands drawing down his dark head hungrily to her own again when he raised it for an instant to look deep into her eyes.
    'Marion!'
    The dying embers of the fire made soft shadows on the wall. They flickered like tiny smiles across the ash, as the log burned through at last, and crumbled into the bottom of the grate with a sound like a sigh. The momentarily stronger flame threw into relief two shadows, and died shyly away as the two became blended into one, and first the duster, then the box of pencils, dropped unnoticed on to the floor.
     

CHAPTER FIVE
    P erhaps it was raining.
    Marion jumped hopefully out of bed and pulled aside the curtains, and her heart sank. A light morning mist shrouded the hills, thickening as it neared the valley and the line of the deck, but already the sun was busy dispelling it from the nearer slopes, fulfilling its promise of a perfect day. There seemed to be no way she could escape spending it with Reeve. Her uncle had irretrievably committed her last night. She shook her head impatiently. She did not want to remember last night. Her cheeks burned at the thought of Reeve, and how he must be laughing at her now.
    'He's won Uncle Miles over, now I suppose he thinks he's won me as well,' she derided herself bitterly. Just what he might want to win her over to escaped her. It all seemed to be bound up in the inexplicable mystery of Reeve himself, and why he had come to the valley.
    'He'll find this morning I'm a different proposition,' she vowed to herself, and her lips set determinedly. If Reeve thought he could gain her trust by a few casually dispensed kisses in the firelight, he could think again.
    But had they been so casual, to her?
    'Of course they were,' she assured herself aloud, and forcefully, as if hearing herself speak might serve to convince her. A flash of temper, a clash of wills, and manlike Reeve had chosen that way to settle it, to get his own way. She tried to ignore the fact that her own feelings would not settle down. The unexpected emotions his kisses roused in her would not return dutifully to hibernation again, and she felt disturbed, and restless, and angry with Reeve because of it. Why, oh, why had Uncle Miles suggested Reeve go with her today? But despite her anger against Reeve, she could not find it in her heart to vent her feelings on her scholarly relative, particularly when he told her amiably,
    'I've sharpened two more of those new pencils for you. You left them in the sitting room last night.' He handed them to her in the hall on her way out, and she accepted them in silence and tucked them inside the rubber band stretched round her clipboard.
    'I've got your map.' To be on the safe side she slipped a waterproof cover over the block of papers. The weather could change with dramatic suddenness on the high tops, and her uncle's parchment was precious.
    'I'll carry that for you.' Reeve appeared and held out his hand, but she clung to her clipboard stubbornly.
    'It's not heavy. Besides, you've got your letters to carry.' To her relief he did not insist, he merely nodded and said,
    'I'll drop these in at the Post Office on our way out, they'll go by the next delivery.'
    'That won't be until this evening, the post van's already gone this morning.' She felt a malicious satisfaction that in this one thing, at least, Reeve could not have his own way.
    'No