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.”

“Well—­if that’s your judgment, after all, I think that the less you meddle with it the better.”

“I never meddle,” said Rowcliffe.

But the Vicar did not leave him.  He had caught the sound of the opening and shutting of the gate.  He listened.

His manner changed again to a complete affability.

“I think that’s Alice.  I should like you to see her.  If you—­”

Rowcliffe gathered that the entrance of Alice had better coincide with his departure.  He followed the Vicar as he went to open the front door.

Alice stood on the doorstep.

She was not at first aware of him where he lingered in the half-darkness at the end of the passage.

“Alice,” said the Vicar, “Dr. Rowcliffe is here.  You’re just in time to say good-bye to him.”

“It’s a pity if it’s good-bye,” said Alice.

Her voice might have been the voice of a young woman who is sanely and innocently gay, but to Rowcliffe’s ear there was a sound of exaltation in it.

He could see her now clearly in the light of the open door.  The Vicar had not lied.  Alice had all the appearances of health.  Something had almost cured her.

But not quite.  As she stood there with him in the doorway, chattering, Rowcliffe was struck again with the excitement of her voice and manner, imperfectly restrained, and with the quivering glitter of her eyes.  By these signs he gathered that if Alice was happy her happiness was not complete.  It was not happiness in his sense of the word.  But Alice’s face was unmistakably the face of hope.

Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with him.  He saw that Alice’s eyes faced him now with the light, unseeing look of indifference, and that they turned every second toward the wall at the bottom of the garden.  She was listening to something.

* * * * *

He was then aware of footsteps on the road.  They came down the hill, passing close under the Vicarage wall and turning where it turned to skirt the little lane at the bottom between the garden and the churchyard.  The lane led to the pastures, and the pastures to the Manor.  And from the Manor grounds a field track trailed to a small wicket gate on the north side of the churchyard wall.  A flagged path went from the wicket to the door of the north transept.  It was a short cut for the lord of the Manor to his seat in the chancel, but it was not the nearest way for anybody approaching the church from the high road.

Now, the slope of the Vicarage garden followed the slope of the road in such wise that a person entering the churchyard from the high road could be seen from the windows of the Vicarage.  If that person desired to remain unseen his only chance was to go round by the lane to the wicket gate, keeping close under the garden wall.