`Gail, how are you? Long time no see!' 'I'm fine, Michael, thank you.' Gail managed a smile, and a friendly nod for Joan. He turned, and Gail rose, moving towards the rim of the lake, her eyes on the little girl who was impatiently asking for more bread. To her dismay the woman had noticed her and was speaking to her husband. What could she do? For some considerable time she had been undecided, but now she knew she must have a post where she could be with children. all this could have been hers had not fate decided otherwise. As always bitter-ness came with recollection, but the expression - in Gail's beautiful brown eyes as she looked at the chil-dren was one of yearning, and in her heart there was a dull ache of hopelessness. But he would be thirty-three now-thirty-įour on the tenth of July. As Gail's eyes moved, to become fixed on the man, she noted with a little sense of shock that his hair was receding, and as he turned to grab hold of one of the children who had strayed too close to the edge, she saw a tiny bald patch on the crown of his head. They were laughing and chattering, but the baby in the pram slept peacefully. She stood by the pram, but her eyes were on the children standing on the lakeside. `Don't go too near the edge,' warned their mother, a rather plain young woman of about twenty-nine years of age.

`I want some as well.' The boy, three years older than his sister, took the bread offered and threw it into the lake.

`Daddy, can we feed the swans?' the small girl, aged four, lifted a pretty face to the smiling man above her he took a crust of bread from the paper bag in his hand and gave it to her. Could she move away unseen? The naked trees and bushes offered no cover at all and Gail sat still, praying she would remain unnoticed. But all at once she stiffened as two young children came skipping along the path, followed by their parents. It was her lunch-hour break and for the past twenty minutes she had been enjoying the fresh air, and the flowers and the song of the birds. Gail sat on a bench, a book, unopened on her lap. The unusual mildness of the temperature had brought office and shop workers into the park and they strolled along the lakeside or took to the grassy rise where snowdrops and crocuses bloomed in profusion beneath the leafless trees. CHAPTER ONE Two graceful white swans glided across the lake, and on the bank ducks and geese preened themselves in the warm February sunshine.

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