Molly Clavering

[from back of Dean Street reprint; photo from Furrowed Middlebrow blog post]

"Sometimes, in a rare moment of leisure, when Mrs. Maitland looked back across the thirty years of her short married life and long widowhood, the ninteen-year-old girl on the other side of the gap seemed a total stranger, incredibly young and untried, incredibly ignorant."

Millie Maitland has settled happily into her busy if slightly impoverished existence in the Scottish village of Mennan, watched over now and then by her solicitor, who once proposed marriage, and her daughter Amabel, grown but still a handful. Millie is much loved by her friends and neighbours, including the gossipy Mrs. Gray, the kind Mrs. Denholm, a shepherd's wife isolated in the hills, and the appalling Mrs. Noble, a flirt whose husband is overseas. But into this contented, quiet life comes a bit of drama. It all starts innocently enough when Martin Heriot, a bachelor farmer, asks Millie to board a black labrador puppy named Sam.