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little primrose-tiled bathroom. Incongruously there was an oxygen cylinder standing by the bath, an unwelcome reminder of my disastrous arrival.
    ‘We keep them in all the visitors’ rooms,’ Mrs. Mallenport said, sitting herself on my bed while I washed and tidied myself. ‘But in no time you’ll find you get as used to the altitude as Hester and James. Ah, I can see them. They’re just coming from the courts. Hester is waving. She’s giving me the thumbs up. They’ve won—how nice! Hester likes to win.’
    I came through from the bathroom. Tactfully I nodded, but did not say I had already formed that opinion myself.
    ‘And now come along, my dear, and meet some of our other nice friends.’
    Mrs. Mallenport led the way down the polished staircase, across the hall and through a sparsely furnished but elegant room, ‘Where we receive, dear, when it’s a formal do. Usually people stand, so we don’t have too much furniture, and if it’s fine, which it usually is, we spill out on to the terrace.’ She opened the glass doors, in demonstration, and stepped out into the sunlight.
    Immediately we were the cynosure of every eye. The buzz of conversation diminished. Cups seemed to pause in mid-air.
    ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ Mrs. Mallenport reassured me softly. ‘Everyone is just a tiny bit homesick, though they wouldn’t admit it for worlds. So the arrival of anyone from the U>K. is always interesting.’
    ‘Even me?’ I asked, used to almost total anonymity at the Foreign Office.
    ‘Oh, especially you, dear.’ Regally and unhurriedly she walked down the flight of shallow steps that led from the terrace to the lawn.
    Mrs. Mallenport was not a diplomat’s wife for nothing. She did not tell me why, especially me. But I guessed from my brief conversation with James Fitzgerald and Hester.
    Because Eve Trent was such a paragon of virtue that they all wondered how on earth I was going to live up to her.
     
    ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t give it a thought,’ said the man in the deck chair beside me, whom Mrs. Mallenport had introduced as Alex Ashford, Aid, Third Embassy Secretary. ‘Eve is Eve, and no one could be like her.’ He himself had brought up the subject by saying when we shook hands, ‘So you’re Eve’s replacement! Well, well. Poor you!’
    I taxed him with that remark after he’d waved me to his chair at the edge of a group of people watching the tennis—James and Hester had gone on to the next round—and pulled up another for himself.
    Mr. Ashford asked me if I minded a pipe and took several unhurried puffs at it before answering. I looked at him speculatively. He seemed a kindly, easy-going sort of chap, a little above medium height, sandyhaired, raw-boned, freckled. A few years older than James Fitzgerald, perhaps, and certainly wiser. The kind of man who’d be good to show a newcomer the ropes— as Mrs. Mallenport had obviously thought when she left me in his care.
    ‘I reckon it’s always rough,’ Alex Ashford spoke at last, ‘to follow someone who never puts a foot wrong.’
    I looked down at my own feet, now nervously planted on the Residence’s razored lawn. From the moment I had landed in Charaguay they had managed to put themselves wrong.
    ‘What he really means,’ a rather extraordinary-looking girl, who wore her hair in a mass of little corkscrew curls, leaned forward—I think Mrs. Mallenport had said she was Morag Cameron, the V.S.O., but she didn’t look old and responsible enough to be doing the work I knew she had done among the shoeshine boys, ‘is that she’s also got the face of an angel and wits of the devil.’ The girl spoke with a soft sweet Highland lilt that scarcely fitted the trenchancy of her words.
    ‘No, I most certainly did not mean anything of the kind, Morag!’
    ‘He’s too diplomatic to say it, but it is so.’
    The girl winked at me. She had a broad face with a snub nose and a long determined upper lip. Her face was without make-up and she wore a