Sarah opened her eyes to see the bright morning light streaming across the embroidered coverlet. She bounded from the high bed and ran over to the window, pushing it open wide. Finally, she thought, a day warm enough for tea in the garden.

The weather had been very gray and cold for most of the two months since she had arrived at Caverleigh. Naturally, at first she had been very sad when her parents left for their long voyage to her father's new posting in Jamaica. But they had promised they would return to fetch her when they were settled. She had already spent most of April and May with her great Aunt Alice, and their frequent letters said they would return for her sometime around the first of July and that Jamacia was a wonderful place. She missed them, but she had found a great deal to occupy her at Caverleigh.

Sarah was an inquisitive, active and cheerful child not given to long periods of subdued confinement. Soon she was exploring the great stone house with its long galleries and huge fireplaces and towering staircases and cupolas. Though the rest of the house was very grand, she loved the kitchen best. There were rows and rows of gleaming copper pots reflecting the firelight and it always smelled so good there. The cook, Mrs. Drummond, was very kind to her. Sarah often took her tea there with the household staff, her feet upon the fireplace fender munching on one of Mrs. Drummond's sweet buns, listening happily to the gossip in the country.

As the weather grew warmer, Sarah began to explore the gardens that stretched out around the house. Giant hedges created a leafy maze. It took an entire army of gardeners to keep them neatly clipped and tended. As the primroses began to open and the pear trees decked themselves in white blossoms, her excitement increased. Sarah asked endless questions of the patient gardeners and to her delight they responded by allowing her to hoe and dig and assist with the spring planting. Every day something new began to bloom.

 In the short time Sarah had been at the great house, she had grown to love Caverleigh and would have been supremely happy there with her new friends and the wonderful, long regular letters from her parents - except for the problem of her great Aunt Alice. She seldom saw her aunt who lived in a secluded suite of rooms in the east wing. She was a soft-spoken, solemn and very solitary woman who preferred her books and her privacy to any social engagements. There were no parties at Caverleigh and no one came to call. Sarah, remembering her parents' instructions, tried very hard to keep quiet and be very polite to Aunt Alice.  Occasionally, she was summoned for dinner with her aunt in the great hall where they sat at an enormously long mahogany table. Aunt Alice still looked very beautiful in her dark emerald velvet with lace around her pale face. She would ask Sarah how she was and Sarah would say that she was fine and the dinner would pass mostly in silence.

Sometimes Aunt Alice would arrange for Sarah to ride on one of the horses in the stable, but she never rode herself and she never even came to watch. Aunt Alice had taken the trouble to find out what Sarah's favorite dishes were and always had Mrs. Drummond prepare them for her dinner, but often Aunt Alice ate in her room and Sarah ate with the staff. Aunt Alice constantly sent lovely storybooks up to Sarah's room and sometimes a new game to amuse her, but when Sarah asked her aunt to read to her, her eyes were always too tired from doing needlework. So...eventually Sarah stopped asking.

Once Sarah had gathered her courage and visited her aunt uninvited in her dim, quiet rooms. Though her aunt was kind, Sarah felt that both of them were relieved when she quickly left. It seemed they had nothing to say to each other. Sarah tried not to feel as though her great aunt didn't like her. She began, instead, to observe her aunt carefully in the evenings when she sat in the drawing room with Aunt Alice and her aunt was intent upon her embroidery. One such evening Sarah was pressing some of the bits of leaves and flowers that she collected that day into her scrapbook. She was also trying to fend off the playful attention of her aunt's big fluffy gray cat, Bart, who seemed to want to help. From the corner of her eye, she saw her Aunt Alice suddenly sigh very deeply and gaze out of the window. "Why she's really very sad," thought Sarah in surprise. "And so alone."