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He had seen Alice and Greatorex on the moors at night as he had driven home from Upthorne. And he had told Rowcliffe what he had seen. And Rowcliffe had told Mary and the Vicar. And at the cottage down by the beck Essy Gale and her mother had spoken together, but what they had spoken and what they had heard they had kept secret. "I haven't been with him," said Alice for the third time.
He loved that smell. It fairly intoxicated him every time. It soared singing through his nostrils into his brain, like gin. There could be no more violent and voluptuous contrast of sensations than to come straight from the cold, biting air of Upthorne and to step into that perfect smell. It was a thick, a sweet, a fiery and sustaining smell. Rowcliffe, he observed, sat between her and her sister.
If he died she would have killed him. Or, rather, she and Greatorex would have killed him between them. This statement Ally held to and reiterated and refused to qualify. For Alice at Upthorne had become a creature matchless in cunning and of subtle and marvelous resource. She had been terrified and tortured, shamed and cowed.
She dragged herself up the hill to Upthorne. It was a day of heat and hidden sunlight. The moor and the marshes were drenched in the gray June mist. The hillside wore soft vapor like a cloak hiding its nakedness. At the top of the Three Fields the nave of the old barn showed as if lifted up and withdrawn into the distance. But it was no longer solitary.
On Friday the sixteenth he saw her again at nightfall, in the doorway of John Greatorex's house. He had overtaken the cart that was carrying John Greatorex's coffin to Upthorne. Low lighted, the long gray house brooded over the marshes, waiting to be disencumbered of its dead.
"I tell you that she's lying if she says she's seen me with him. She's never seen me." "It wasn't Essy who saw you," Mary said. "Somebody else is lying then. Who was it?" "If you must know who saw you," the Vicar said, "it was Dr. Harker. You were seen a month ago hanging about Upthorne alone with that fellow." "Only once," Ally murmured. "You own to 'once'? You you " he stifled with his fury.
But as the Vicar of Garth had called on him and left his card on Monday, there was no reason why he shouldn't look in on Wednesday about teatime. Especially as he knew that the Vicar was in the habit of visiting Upthorne and the outlying portions of his parish on Wednesday afternoons. All day Alice lay in her little bed like a happy child and waited.
She said to herself, "He's lying. He's lying. He's made it all up. He never met them." She had passed the turn of the hill. She had come to the high towers, sinister and indistinct, to the hollow walls and haunted arcades of the dead mining station. Upthorne was hidden by the shoulder of the hill. She stopped suddenly, there where the road skirted the arcades.
For the neighborhood that had received Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had barred her sister. As long as Alice Greatorex lived at Upthorne Mary went in fear. This fear was so intolerable to her that at last she spoke of it to Rowcliffe. They were sitting together in his study after dinner. The two armchairs were always facing now, one on each side of the hearth.
Sometimes, returning from his northerly rounds, he would send the trap on, and walk back to Morfe by Karva, on the chance. Once, when the moon was up, he sighted her on the farther moors beyond Upthorne, when he got down and walked with her for miles, while his man and the trap waited for him in Garth. But that was reckless.
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