For one of the other passengers for Alderley might well be Algy Fotheringay, and it would be ghastly if he spotted her and she was stuck with his company all the way. But she probably didn't need to worry: Algy would certainly be travelling first class and wouldn't deign to enter her humble third class compartment. In fact, she thought, with a momentary and uncharacteristic twinge of bitterness, it was probably rare for any but first class passengers to have the train stopped at Alderley.

It was horrible to be poor. Especially when your family had once been rich and influential. It had been in her grandfather's day that things had really started to go wrong. It was almost frightening, looking back, to see how quickly a family fortune could shrink. Her father, an only child, might have been able to retrieve the situation. But he had been a charming and impractical dilettante, who had never really woken up to the fact that he was becoming poor. His wife and family had not realised it, but the cost of giving Jane and her younger sister Jennifer a good education, and enabling them to do the London season, had almost bankrupted him. He had died suddenly, almost penniless and uninsured.

Mrs. Clifton and her daughters, then twenty and eighteen, had found themselves in great difficulties. They had raised some capital by selling both the country home near Bath and the town house, and had rented a smaller one just outside London. But it had been clear that they would not be able to live on this money for long, and that at least one of the girls would have to get a job.

Jennifer had been fortunate. She had been the beauty of the season the previous year, and at school had shone in theatricals. She had decided to try her luck on the stage. She could afford no formal training, but her looks and a natural talent had stood her in good stead. After a few months in provincial repertory, and a cameo part in a talkie by the promising young director Alfred Hitchcock, she had got her big break: the chance of going on a long tour of the United States with a leading Shakespearian company. Jennifer had jumped at the opportunity.

With the tour half over, she had died suddenly.

It had fallen to Jane to break the news to her mother that Jennifer had succumbed to a rare disease and been buried in the mid-west of America.

Mrs. Clifton had never really recovered from her husband's death, and the new shock had been too much for her. She suffered an immediate heart attack and died eight weeks later.

A distraught Jane, who in at little over eighteen months had seen her whole world collapse, had tried to drown her grief with gaiety. She had joined up with a set of the so-called bright young things and had lived wildly for twelve months.

She had gone through about half her money when, one day, on a visit to Somerset, she had run into one of her father's ex-gardeners. He had told her that his young son was dangerously ill. There was no hope for him - unless by a miracle he could be taken to Vienna for a new operation perfected by an Austrian surgeon.

Jane had seen the family's doctor, checked with her bank, and agreed to pay all the expenses.

The operation was completely successful. But Jane had been cleaned out: she had no choice but to get a job.

This, however, had not turned out to be so easy. She was without qualifications, and she shied away from the usual sort of position taken up by girls of her class in similar circumstances - nursery governess or paid companion. Eventually she had obtained a post as a hotel receptionist -only to walk out after one week when the manager made a pass at her. Then she had moved to the country to become an instructress at a riding school. This had gone well until one day she had seen a pupil, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a rich company promoter with a large family of potential clients, viciously beating a troublesome horse. Jane had snatched the whip and used it to give three or four vigorous thwacks across the back of the girl's riding jacket.

In London again, Jane had got work with an antique dealer. This had lasted until she had discovered she was expected to ask certain customers to pay with two cheques - but to enter only one in the books.