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If you had been able to float over Meadowstream on a magic carpet you would have seen a patchwork of fields and woods, ribboned by winding lanes converging on the village green; and this patchwork would be spread between the downs to the south and the dark mass of Ladslove Hill to the west. You would also have seen, I regret to say, an advancing fringe of red brick villas, still distant, but coming near enough to spread a certain amount of alarm and despondency to the older residents. We will avert our eyes from them. They need never trouble us at Merry Hall, because we are grand enough to be surrounded by our own land, and in any case we have planted such vast quantities of evergreens that nothing short of the Empire State Building could ever cast an alien shadow over our privacy.
'What a peaceful place!' you might well say to yourself, as you peered over the edge of the magic carpet. 'How lucky are the inhabitants of this rural retreat! What spiritual calm must invest them ... what sweet thoughts must fill their minds!' How could you be expected to guess that Meadowstream, in reality, was not a peaceful place at all? Why should you suspect that it was torn by violent emotions and riven by passionate rivalries — that its inhabitants were constantly holding their breath, awaiting the outcome of a succession of rural dramas?
Such, however, was the case. There were no less than three of these dramas, mounting to a climax, on this last summer of the Oldfield regime.
There was the drama of Our Rose, and her sudden discovery that she had powers of spiritual healing and the awful effect that this discovery was to have on another of my neighbours, Miss Emily Kaye.
There was the drama of little Miss Mint and her monstrous tenants, the Stromens, who at this very moment were moving into her cottage, with results which not even the most pessimistic could have forecast.
And there was the drama of The Fence, which very nearly split Meadowstream into two warring camps.
