Many thanks to those of you who have been reading and/or reviewing. I think I too can see why Rilla goes to Una rather than Nan -I'm not entirely sure Una doesn't rush to Nan's defence in an effort to extract herself from the situation she finds herself in.

Nan, letting herself into the Allan house, lingered for a moment at the front door. It was the sort of late-August day that whispered of Autumn, the slightest touch of cold in the wind, the lilacs had gone black but the Michaelmas daisies, with their dear baby-faces, bobbed merrily at the side of the road and the Rosehips and cooking apples were beginning to ripen. She looked heavenward for a moment, but there were no clouds to be had and even if there had been, she was brought out of her dream by Mrs. Allan calling out crisply, 'Is that Nan? You must remember to close the door. It's getting quite cold out you know.'

Nan closed the door. The reality was that Mrs. Allan had the fire going with absurd vigour, and the house was positively stuffy. Mr. Allan knew this; Nan had heard him say so. She liked him; she often felt they were bonded by the experience of Mrs. Allan's bossing. She came into the parlour and hovered, hands folded before Mrs. Allan.

'What have you got in your hands,' she asked curiously of Nan. Nan spread her hands, she had forgotten how poor this woman's vision was, and made a mental note to be patient with her.

'I need you and Reginald to make up the bed for me. The girl who came in yesterday did it all wrong.' There seemed to be a whole sequence of 'girls.' Nan was never quite sure why they didn't stretch to Wednesdays and Fridays.

Making up the bed was a maddeningly elaborate process. Nan had learnt hospital corners as a girl by observing Susan Baker. She had perched on the window-seat in the room she and Di had shared while Susan made up the beds, watching closely, so that later in the week she could tuck the corners back in and recreate the luxury of what she called 'tight corners' that came with the linen change. She brought this skill forward now, even as Mrs. Allan said; 'the sheet must be tight at the corners, very tight.'

'I think you're making rather too much fuss dear,' said Mr. Allan mildly. 'You seem to be overcomplicating things. This sheet, for instance, won't fall evenly.'

'Do stop,' said his wife imperiously. 'It's only because you don't understand what I mean, Reg. Now, you must fold the top of the blanket back at the top and tuck it in on your side, tight, but not Nan's side, because I'll get into bed that way.'

Nan shared a look with the long-suffering man opposite her. He was right, the sheet wouldn't fall evenly; never had she had so much trouble making up a bed before.

'Are the corners quite tight?' demanded Mrs. Allan with a vengeance when they stopped.

'They're hospital corners anyway,' Nan said, hoping her irritation didn't show.

'Oh, you needn't bother with that,' said Mrs. Allan. Nan felt her temper flare up and bit the inside of her cheek to check it. It would not do to offend this woman. Besides, she seemed to have given up on the bed. She was now giving Nan detailed instructions for the scrubbing of the basin, as if Nan did not know how to scrub basins.

'Make it shine,' she said to Nan. It glistened in the height of the August sunlight by the time Nan had finished, the basin having received the bulk of Nan's exasperation mediated only by a scrub-brush.

The remnant of her irritation was vented to Una over tea in the garden, while John collected catalpa blossoms and pulled up the little daisies in the lawn and tried to join them together. Nan, watching him, thought that like his mother, he lacked the trick of splitting daisy without breaking them and she reached for a buttercup to tickle the hollow under his chin.

'Do you like butter pet?' she said, stopping only to look for the telltale yellow mark.

'Oh I see, you like it lots, don't you? What does mummy say? Am I right?'

Una laughed. 'He does too. Tell me about your morning.'

'No, no, you don't want to hear about that,' said Nan, stretching herself out on the lawn, cat-like, Una thought, and resting her head on her upraised hand. With the other, she unpinned her hair, so that it fell in great coils over her shoulder and to her waist, the brown of acorns in autumn, and framing her face in a way that suggested a pre-Raphaelite painting.

'Yes I do, you looked worn out when I came in. Shall I pour out?'

'It will make you feel useful, won't it? Go on then,' said Nan indulgently. Una took her at her word.

'They're not so bad as all that,' said Nan, half sitting up and sweeping her hair over her shoulder as she sipped her tea.

'I feel peculiarly responsible for them now. It wouldn't be so bad if she didn't give me such a lashing for getting the littlest thing wrong. I didn't put enough cream in the green jar a fortnight back and now whenever I go to do the cream she says, 'be sure to add lots,' just like that. Why she can't use the cream from the jar it comes in, I don't know. It's what anyone else would do.'

'She sounds in the mode of Aunt Martha,' said Una sympathetically.

'She may well be, I've never seen her do a bit of housework,' then, catching herself, 'I shouldn't be unkind. It's because of her eyes you know, she really can't see very well.'

'Even so, the cream sounds a fairly harmless offense. Have a biscuit before we reach an impasse of manners.'

That made Nan laugh. 'You'll have taken over the whole of the tea service before the afternoon is out. John, pet, have a biscuit. You're supposed to stop mummy and I waiting on each other to do so.'

'Biscuit!' said John triumphantly, abandoning the daisies and seizing upon one of the gingersnaps his mother had brought as an offering. Nan took one too.

'His words are coming on,' she said to Una, eyes twinkling. Then she grew serious and said, 'is Rilla all right, do you know?'

'I –don't know, no,' said Una, untruthfully for once.

'You look as if you do, dearest, God never meant you for saying things which are not, and I don't say that to lecture you; your voice gives you away. Let me in on whatever it is; I won't try and interfere. Only, well, you look as if it wouldn't hurt and you know you can always talk to me.'

'I would like to,' said Una, beginning to relent.

'I've been hearing both sides of it for a long time now.'

'Then you really must tell me, Una, because it's awful to be caught in the middle; I know. I used to have to arbitrate for Walter and Di on those rare days when they fell out. It was dreadful; I wanted so much not to hurt him, and at the same time I felt honour-bound to take Di's side.'

'It's not quite so bad as that,' said Una, who felt no obligation to side with anyone, only wished to goodness someone else could play the adjudicator for her.

'It's odd, I hardly know Ken –or I would have said I didn't until about two weeks ago, and now I feel sure I know entirely too much, too much about Rilla too, if it comes to that.'

She might have said more, for she dearly wanted to tell Nan about it, but then, if Rilla wanted Nan to know, surely she would have told her? Nan continued to sit patiently, ever listening, thinking her feeling now must approximate that of a dentist trying to remove an awkward tooth.

'It's all gotten terribly complicated,' said Una, stopping John short of eating the daisies he had been engrossed with a little while ago.

'Of course it's complicated if you're in the middle of it,' said Nan. Una made no answer.

'Look,' said Nan, in a burst of practicality, 'if it's got to go somewhere, which it clearly has, because even you are only human, it may as well be her sister. It won't be the first time I've listened to someone else's headache, and I shouldn't think it will be the last. The only difference is that I know you, and am predisposed to want to listen.'

Una could see the sense in this. She looked across at John anxiously. Nan laughed, and lapsing happily into the nonsense language of her childhood, said, 'I don't suppose you ever thought you'd have cause to use this, did you?'

'No,' said Una, suddenly intensely grateful to her older siblings for flaunting Arague language and driving herself and Carl to distraction over it. She lay down on her side, mirroring Nan's posture and told her all the ins and outs of the argument she had been adjudicating for so long now.

'I wish she'd told me,' Nan said softly.

'I wish she had too; you're better equipped to cope with that kind of trouble than I am.'

'I can imagine. I have a hard time believing arguing was your preferred method of sweethearting, or being courted, or whatever I'm supposed to call it –oh for goodness' sake stop looking as though you'd like nothing better than to disappear into the ground. I refuse to believe you got to where you are now without at least a shadow of courtship.'

'I think,' said Una, ignoring Nan and speaking very decidedly to the grass, which was to all appearances quite as fluent in Arague language as herself, ' Rilla felt she couldn't because she knew how much…'

'How much I miss Agnes? Well, yes, I suppose I see her point, but it's not at all the same thing, is it? She can still talk to me about life. It's not as if I haven't lived my share of it, after all. Besides, I don't think I'd have been in a hurry to have another baby if I still had lamby…I'm not now, either…funny she didn't think you'd mind, isn't it?'

'Not really, it's you and Jerry the world is thinking about, and it's right that way, Nan. Persis thought of it, I know, but it's what Persis does, isn't it, never mind that I more or less told her at the time. As far as Rilla's concerned, you came home with me because you were convalescing –'

' –I see, and that's what you do? I suppose it is, when I stop and think about it, you look after people; hence the tangle you've got yourself into over my sister's marriage. The world is all askew at the moment. I can only suppose it will unravel and come to order eventually.'

'It will do,' said Una, pouring out more tea.

'I wonder,' Nan said now, sitting a little straighter so she would not spill her tea into its saucer as she received it from Una, 'how much time they had to get to know each other, in the beginning I mean, when they were first married.'

'It can't have been much,' said Una, almost laughing, 'if you go calendricallly backward from Gil's birthday.' So saying, she began to count backwards on her fingers from June, thereby arriving at the earliest point of Gil's existence as it were, when he was yet only a look in his mother's eye.

'You and Persis are a right pair for things like that –she's making you into quite an expert. I'd never stopped to think of that,' said Nan, really laughing. 'He did come about in fairly short order. That's what I mean, I suppose. Jerry and I had time, just the two of us, you must have had it too, a time when you weren't having to anticipate this one,' and she gestured at John, still trying and failing to link up his daisies.

'Months of it,' said Una, adding to tease Nan, 'and it was more than we might have been expected to because the world was terrified of interfering, if memory serves.'

'You must feel it's done an about-face,' said Nan sympathetically.

'What with Carl and Persis coming and staying as long as they did, John, my various and manifold troubles, no doubt all of Rilla's unhappinesses, Rosemary worrying herself into knots over Bruce, Bruce himself, Mrs. Craig's altos, Carl and Persis again, the cats –I could go on –I really ought to ask when you last had time to yourself.'

'Well, when you put it like that,' said Una, pouring out more tea.

'I start to understand why John has your undivided attention. If the world keeps intruding like this, he won't ever have to worry about losing it.'

'Nan really,' said Una because there was nothing else to say.

'Then, in the cool of the late afternoon, they had moved on to lighter topics, hunted out cloud-pictures with John, and Nan had shown him how to make the daisies into chains –not for the first time and not for the last either. John's hands never would be the right size for daisy chains, but they were not to know that then. He half-crawled, half-teetered around the blanket they were sitting on, chasing the small white butterflies that came to feast on clover, and had not luck catching them. The shadows had only the suggestion of lengthening in them, when at half past four, Una drew him to her and said they out to be going back.

'I trust Persis with many things,' she said laughing, 'but fish curry is not one of them.'

'You're just worried she'll forget to put some by for the cats,' said Nan laughing.