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catering for the household at Thrush Green, keeping an eye on the larder and making intelligent suggestions to Joan for the evening meal when Edward would be home.
    Joan began to hope that Molly would indeed stay forever, as she had so ardently promised. But on the day of Thrush Green Fair young Ben Curdle had walked into Molly Piggott's life, and by the time the harvest was being gathered, things had changed at the house on Thrush Green.

    It had been a cold, wretched day that year for the first of May. The gusts of wind shivered the young lime leaves above the caravans and the sky was as gray as the canvas tent which housed the "Marine Wonder" hard by.
    Molly had spoken a few words, during the morning, to the dark young man who was busy erecting the scaffolding for the coconut shies opposite her cottage. She had liked him from the first moment that she had seen him when she was scrubbing the doorstep. She liked his soft voice and his crinkly, wiry hair and the odd shape of his dark eyes. If she had been drawing his face, she thought to herself, she would have put triangles for his eyes. Molly liked drawing and Miss Watson had often pinned her sketches on the schoolroom wall for her fellow-pupils to admire.
    He had called to her when she emerged to go shopping for old Mr. Piggott's dinner with her basket on her arm. He was squatting down in the wet grass, his hair upswept in the wind, looking intently at something on the ground.
    "Come and see," he invited, giving her a crooked smile, his head on one side. Molly had crossed the road and gone to look. A young frog, speckled and yellow, crouched between Ben's shoes, its throat pulsing, its starfish front feet turned in. For a dreadful moment Molly feared that he might kill it, as she had seen other stupid country boys do when they were displaying their manly bravado before the girls, but with relief and pleasure she watched him gather it in his grimy hands. He rose in one graceful movement and crossed to the railings of the churchyard where the grass grew tallest. He deposited the reptile there and returned to Molly, wiping his hands down his black corduroy trousers.
    "Coming to the fair?" he asked.
    Molly nodded, her face alight with mischief.
    "And bringing a boy," she quipped. Ben's face clouded and Molly was unaccountably stirred.
    "Only a little one," she said, laughing. "Lives over there." She nodded across to the Bassetts' house, hitched her basket farther up her arm and set off for the butcher's shop.
    "See you later then," Ben called after her; and Molly had trotted away, conscious of his eyes upon her back.
    That afternoon Joan had asked her to collect some eggs from Dotty Harmer's and Molly had joyfully accepted the basket and the money, for the way lay close to the coconut shies.

    Dotty Harmer was an eccentric old maid who lived alone in a ramshackle cottage in one of the meadows which bordered the path to Lulling Woods. Her father had been a history master at the local grammar school and Dotty had kept house for the old man until his death, when she sold their home, bringing some of the furniture, all the books, four cats, two dogs and a collection of medicinal herbs to her new abode. The herbs flourished in her tiny garden, with roses, peonies, lilies and carnations which were the envy of all the gardeners in Lulling.
    Dotty concocted alarming potions from the herbs and these she pressed upon her unwilling neighbors and friends if they were unwary enough to admit to any slight ailment in her presence. So far, she had killed no one, but the vicar of Saint Andrew's had once had to call in Dr. Bailey as he was in agony with severe stomach pains, and had to admit that he had taken tea and sandwiches with a peculiar and pungent filling at Dotty Harmer's a few hours before. The doctor had dismissed his troubles airily, diagnosing, "Dotty's Collywobbles," a fairly common Lulling complaint, and had warned him about accepting further hospitality at that lady's hands.
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