Rowcliffe heard the wicket gate click softly as it was softly opened and shut.

And he could have sworn that Alice heard it too.

* * * * *

He waited twenty minutes or so in his surgery.  Then, instead of sending at once to the Red Lion for his trap, he walked back to the church.

Standing in the churchyard, he could hear the sound of the organ and of a man’s voice singing.

He opened the big west door softly and went softly in.

XLII

There is no rood-screen in Garth church.  The one aisle down the middle of the nave goes straight from the west door to the chancel-rails.

Standing by the west door, behind the font, Rowcliffe had an uninterrupted view of the chancel.

The organ was behind the choir stalls on the north side.  Alice was seated at the organ.  Jim Greatorex stood behind her and so that his face was turned slantwise toward Rowcliffe.  Alice’s face was in pure profile.  Her head was tilted slightly backward, as if the music lifted it.

Rowcliffe moved softly to the sexton’s bench in the left hand corner.  Sitting there he could see her better and ran less risk of being seen.

The dull stained glass of the east window dimmed the light at that end of the church.  The organ candles were lit.  Their jointed brackets, brought forward on each side, threw light on the music book and the keys, also on the faces of Alice and Greatorex.  He stood so close to her as almost to touch her.  She had taken off her hat and her hair showed gold against the drab of his waist-coat.

On both faces there was a look of ecstasy.

It was essentially the same ecstasy; only, on Alice’s face it was more luminous, more conscious, and at the same time more abandoned, as if all subterfuge had ceased in her and she gave herself up, willing and exulting, to the unspiritual sense that flooded her.

On the man’s face this look was more confused.  It was also more tender and more poignant, as if in soaring Jim’s rapture gave him pain.  You would have said that he had not given himself to it, but that he was driven by it, and that yet, with all its sensuous trouble, there ran through it, secret and profoundly pure, some strain of spiritual longing.

And in his thick, his poignant and tender half-barytone, half-tenor, Greatorex sang: 

  “’At e-ee-vening e-er the soon was set,
    The sick, oh Lo-ord, arou-ound thee laay—­
  Oh, with what divers pains they met,
    And with what joy they went a-waay—­’”

But Alice stopped playing and Rowcliffe heard her say, “Don’t let’s have that one, Jim, I don’t like it.”

It might have passed—­even the name—­but that Rowcliffe saw Greatorex put his hand on Alice’s head and stroke her hair.

Then he heard him say, “Let’s ’ave mine,” and he saw that his hand was on Alice’s shoulders as he leaned over her to find the hymn.