13-year old Matt is spending the holidays at the dilapidated Woodhall mansion where his spirited step-sister Caroline works as cook. In a faded rose garden Matt meets Alix, proud old Madame Ayre's granddaughter, and is introduced to the tension-filled relationship between the embittered mother and her crippled son Theo. Matt must learn to judge character rather than appearances as Theo strives to turn the house into a home for orphans. Alix, through her willful foolishness, puts Theo's life in danger and brings a dramatic confrontation: Christian hope versus fatal self-pride. A timeless book with a fast-paced plot and vivid characters. England, 1950's RL4.3 Of read-aloud interest ages 11-up Meriol Trevor (1919-2000) graduated from Oxford in 1942. Her first publications were books for children and historical novels. Miss Trevor said, “In all my books for children I have concentrated on personal relations, usually with the more serious confrontations between the adults—but also adult/child and child with child—occasioned by the general events going on at the time.” This emphasis on relationship is a key feature in all of her books. Miss Trevor also wrote a number of acclaimed biographies—including ones on Pope St. John XXIII, St. Philip Neri and St. John Henry Newman. In 1967 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.     THE first time Matt went to Woodhall it was June, it was midsummer and the sun shone all day long in the middle of the blue sky. All the fields were green with corn as he went through them, the meadows with long grass waving till the hay-cutter came, or short and emerald where the cows were grazing, for there had been days of rain, but now the rain was gone, cleared off as if it had never been and all the middle country of England lay bright around as he went through, going in the train. It was half-term and Matt was going to visit his sister. He had no mother or father, but he had this stepsister who was fifteen years older and always looked after him. Her name was Caroline Rendal, but Matt called her Caro. He was just thirteen. In term time, now, he lived in Birmingham with Aunt Maud Baker, who was elderly and widowed and had never had any children. She thought it was her duty to help ‘poor Caroline’ with Matthew, as she always called him, so that he came almost to dislike the sound of his whole name. For Aunt Maud thought Matt a clumsy, untidy nuisance of a boy, and told him so several times a day. Luckily he was at school till tea-time most days. But now Birmingham and school and Aunt Maud’s tiny tidy brick house were left behind, and Matt was going to visit his sister in the place where she was working. It was something of a mystery to Matt, this place called Woodhall, because it seemed such a big house, and yet there were not many servants there to run it. Caro was doing the cooking, but she said nobody else lived in except an old French Mademoiselle who did the flowers and dusted the best china ornaments. The housework was done daily by women who came up from the village. Caro’s jobs were usually in schools, so that she could have holidays with Matt, but last term she had got engaged to be married to a man called Jasper Hartnoll. Jasper was tall and handsome and had a Jaguar and a good job in a Birmingham firm, and he did not like Caro working as cook in a school and so she gave it up. “Just think, Matt,” she said. “When I’m married we shall have a home of our own and you can have a room just as you like, just exactly as you like.” But Matt was gloomy. He did not like Jasper Hartnoll. He had a feeling Jasper would spoil any home for him. He also felt Jasper did not like him, thought he was stupid and a nuisance and wished Caro had no relations. Suddenly one day Caro told Matt she was going to take a job again. “What will Jasper say?” he asked, very surprised. “I shan’t tell him till I’m there,” said Caro. She then explained that Jasper’s father was a very rich man and not only director of his firm but a baronet as well, Sir Godfrey Hartnoll. It turned out that when Jasper had started to tell him he wanted to marry Caro, Sir Godfrey had got very angry indeed and had refused to listen at all. Jasper was his only son and would be Sir Jasper one day and inherit all his money, and Sir Godfrey was furious at the idea of his wanting to marry a girl who was nothing but a cook, because somehow he found out about her job and despised her at once because of it. “So we have got to wait and get him used to the idea slowly,” said Caro. “And I would rather go on earning my own living till it’s all settled.” So she took this job doing the cooking in a big house near Bewdley in the country of the Wyre Forest, beyond Severn. Her letters for the first half of term had been very hurried and Matt only knew that her employer was an old lady called Mrs. Ayre, who was French by birth, and was known as “Madame” and who lived alone in the big house with her granddaughter Alix. Now, on this