Maddie Finn lives with her mother above a converted stables in the frounds of a big house owned by the gloom Harold Delamore. It’s their ‘cosy refuge against the world’, and Maddies’s favourite task is to walk Sale, Mr Delamore’s rear, prizewinning dog.But one day Maddie and her mother are given two months notice by the trouble-making Delia Delamore, home from her boarding school – or has she been expelled?