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Updated: May 28, 2025
Even Ally couldn't wonder. There was influenza in every other house in the Dale. Then, one day, Gwenda, walking past Upthorne, heard wheels behind her and the clanking hoofs of the doctor's horse. She knew what would happen. Rowcliffe would pull up a yard or two in front of her. He would ask her where she was going and he would make her drive with him over the moor.
Her brooding look said that she laid a secret fear to rest. "Garth couldn't satisfy a girl like Gwenda." Rowcliffe said no, he supposed it couldn't satisfy her. His dejection was by this time terrible. It cast a visible, a palpable gloom. "She's a restless creature," said Mary, smiling. There was no reason why he should be so horribly hurt.
Her needles went with a rapid jerk, driven by the vibration of her irritated nerves. From time to time she glanced at Rowcliffe under her bent brows. She saw the same blocks of print, a deep block at the top, a short line under it, then a narrower block. She saw them as vague, meaningless blurs of gray stippled on white.
There were the two unmarried daughters of a retired manufacturer on the far side of the Green. They were plump and had red cheeks, if he had cared for plumpness and red cheeks; but they had no conversation. The only pretty girl whose prettiness appealed to Rowcliffe had an "adenoid" mouth which he held to be a drawback.
She was his to bend or break or utterly destroy. She who was capable of anything was capable of an indestructible devotion. His times, the relentless, the monotonously recurring, were her times too. But Rowcliffe had kept to his days for visiting the Vicarage. He came twice or thrice a week; not counting Wednesdays.
Rowcliffe continued, regardless of the Vicar's stare: "She's better off as she is than tied to a chap who isn't a bit too sober. Especially if he doesn't care for her." The Vicar rose and took up his usual defensive position on the hearth. "Well, Dr. Rowcliffe, if those are your ideas of morality ?" "They are not my ideas of morality, only my judgment of the individual case."
"Only Mummy my stepmother." She smiled through her tears. "Papa would never let Ally go to her." "Why not?" "Because she ran away from him." He tried not to laugh. "She's really quite decent, though you mightn't think it." Rowcliffe smiled. "And she's fond of Ally. She's fond of all of us except Papa. And," she added, "she knows a lot of people." He smiled again. He pictured the third Mrs.
"It's a beautiful place, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice. And she did actually think it was beautiful with its stone floor, its white-washed walls, its black oak dresser and chest and settle; not because of these things but because it was on the border of her Paradise. Rowcliffe had sent her there.
All the way home she kept on saying to herself, "I've saved Ally." "I've saved Ally." That thought, splendid and exciting, rushed to the lighted front of Mary's mind; if the thought of Rowcliffe followed its shining trail, it thrust him back, it spread its luminous wings to hide him, it substituted its heavenly form for his.
"Come in, Gwenda," said the Vicar with exaggerated suavity. She came in and closed the door. Then she saw Alice. She took the hand that Rowcliffe held out to her without looking at him. She was looking at Alice. Alice gave a low cry and struggled to her feet. "I thought you were never coming," she said. Gwenda held her in her arms. She faced them. "What have you been doing to her all of you?"
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