CHARITY AT HOME

Charity is fourteen, a touchy time; then there's the fact that she doesn't even remember her parents and she's been brought up by an aunt and uncle, who have never filled in her past; she also feels they don't or can't understand her--she's different. Sometimes she indulges the notion she's Cinderella, sometimes the fantasy that she's really the child of wealthy, widowed Mr. Tressider who gives her a gala birthday party at the close. This structures the external action which picks up considerable momentum and concerns Charity, and Derek--back from a reform school, and his furtive, frightened and unwilling involvement in an attempt to rob Mr. Tressider. All of it reads with sympathetic ease and interest.