IT WAS FOUR o’clock on a wet September afternoon when the telephone rang and a voice with a slight Cockney accent pronounced the words that changed Miss Perkin’s life. She was sitting in the old rocking-chair in the kitchen, and, since the chair was made of wood, and Miss Perkin was exceedingly thin and bony, she kept shifting her position uneasily from time to time, much to the annoyance of a large black and white tom cat that sat on her lap. He extended a fat black paw, tipped with ermine, and curved his claws round her knee to show his disapproval. She winced.
    “Don’t stick your pins in, Sam, there’s a good boy,” she said severely, “or you’ll have to go down.”
    But the cat knew it was an idle threat. He was the only inhabitant of 27 Derwent Crescent who realised she had a soft side. Even Richard, the son of the house, who had some affection for her, regarded her as an old battle-axe.
    Miss Perkin was the daughter of a country vicar, the youngest of three children. When her father had first beheld his infant daughter’s ugly red face looking up at him from the old wooden cradle, he had exclaimed: “Why, bless my soul! A proper little Martha, if ever there was one!” So Martha she had been christened, and it must be admitted that the name suited her splendidly. Mary, her elder sister, lived up to her name too. She sat at her father’s feet, drinking in whatever words of wisdom (or otherwise) that fell from his lips, while Martha did the cooking. Mark, the only brother, who was good-looking and charming but singularly lacking in brains, emigrated to Australia, with the intention of making his fortune in sheep. But his plan hadn’t pros­pered. First it was drought, then the foot-and-mouth disease, until finally he had been forced to sell his sheep-farm, together with the few sheep that remained. His letters to his family came at longer and longer intervals, until finally they stopped altogether. Rumour said that he had gone native and was living the shocking, if pleasant, life of a lotus-eater on a sun-baked beach some­where on the north-east coast of Queensland. One day the vicar of Brackenthwaite-in-Borrowdale received a letter from a bank in Australia informing him of his son’s death.
    Mary, meanwhile, had fallen in love with a high- minded, long-winded young clergyman who was acting-secretary of the Westmorland and Cumberland S.P.C.K. Directly after their marriage, the two of them had shaken the dust of England off their feet, and departed for the even more dusty plains of darkest Africa. Their intention had been to minister to the heathen, but their plans had miscarried somewhere. The ungrateful heathen had quietly murdered them both dur­ing the rainy season when everybody’s nerves were on edge. After this, there was only Martha left to comfort and look after her grief-stricken and ageing parents. She was nineteen and had just left school. There had been some talk of her taking a secretarial course—shorthand and typewriting, and modern languages, for she was clever— but the shattering news of her brother’s and sister’s deaths so close to each other had finished off this project before it had begun. Clearly, it was Martha’s duty to look after her parents—so said all the parishioners, and Martha herself never doubted it.