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If I had a servant who groveled to me like that I'd tell him he must learn to keep his chin up or go." She had said it before Robina who had laughed. And Mr. Cartaret's answer to it had been to turn his back on both of them and leave the room. At least he thought it was his answer.
They were not more intolerable than the days that would come after, when the thing she was doing would be every bit as hard. Only her instinct was afraid of something happening within those five days that would make the hard thing harder. On Sunday Mrs. Cartaret's letter came. Her house, she said, was crammed with fiends till Friday.
All the same, it was Mr. Cartaret's rule to go back into the study and to bore himself again for a whole hour till it was bed-time. He liked to be sure that the doors were all bolted and that everybody else was in bed before he went himself. But to-night he had bored himself so badly that the thought of his study was distasteful to him. So he stayed where he was with his family.
Presently he would want to get to the center of things. He might ultimately specialise. If he did he rather thought it would be gynæcology. He was interested in women's cases. Or it might be nervous diseases. He wasn't sure. Anyhow, it must be something big. For under Gwenda Cartaret's eyes his romantic youth became fiery and turbulent inside him.
"I know," he said, "the very serious view you took of her. But I think, my dear fellow, when you've seen her you'll admit that you were mistaken." Rowcliffe said there was nothing he desired more than to have been mistaken, but he was afraid he couldn't admit it. Miss Cartaret's state, when he last saw her, had been distinctly serious.
It not only urged him to tremendous heights, it made him actually feel that he would reach them. For a solid three-quarters of an hour, walking over the moor by Karva, he had ceased to be one of the obscurest of obscure little country doctors. And Gwenda Cartaret's eyes never for a moment contradicted him. They agreed with every one of his preposterous statements.
God knew he hadn't meant to set it for her, and God only knew how he was going to get her out of it. "Poor things," he thought, "if they only knew how horribly they embarrass me!" For of course she wasn't the first. The situation had repeated itself, monotonously, scores of times in his experience. It would have been a nuisance even if Alice Cartaret had not been Gwendolen Cartaret's sister.
For the last eighteen months visits at the Vicarage had been perfunctory and very brief, month by month they had diminished, and before Mary's marriage they had almost ceased. Still, Mary's marriage had appeased the parish. Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had atoned for the third Mrs. Cartaret's suspicious absence and for Gwenda Cartaret's flight.
Rowcliffe had ten minutes on his hands while they were bringing his trap round from the Red Lion. He was warming his hands at the surgery fire when he heard voices in the parlor on the other side of the narrow passage. One voice pleaded, the other reserved judgment. "Do you think he'd do it if I were to go up and ask him?" It was Alice Cartaret's voice. "I caann't say, Miss Cartaret, I'm sure."
They stood on their thresholds looking at each other across the narrow passage. It was as if Alice Cartaret's feet were fixed there by an invisible force that held her fascinated and yet frightened. Rowcliffe had paused too, as at a post of vantage, the better to observe her.
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