His eyes watched under half-closed lids the movements of her hands and the pretty droop of her head.  And he said to himself, “How sweet she is.  And how innocent.  And good.”

Their chairs were set near together in the small plot of grass.  The little trees of the orchard shut them in.  He began to notice things about her that he had not noticed before, the shape and color of her finger nails, the modeling of her supple wrists, the way her ears were curved and laid close to her rather broad head.  He saw that her skin was milk-white at the throat, and honey-white at her ears, and green-white, the white of an elder flower, at the roots of her red hair.

And as she unwound her ball of wool it rolled out of her lap and fell between her feet.

She stooped suddenly, bringing under Rowcliffe’s eyes the nape of her neck, shining with golden down, and her shoulders, sun-warmed and rosy under the thin muslin of her blouse.

They dived at the same moment, and as their heads came up again their faces would have touched but that Rowcliffe suddenly drew back his own.

“I say, I do beg your pardon!”

It was odd, but in the moment of his recoil from that imminent contact Rowcliffe remembered the little red-haired nurse.  Not that there was much resemblance; for, though the little nurse was sweet, she was not altogether innocent, neither was she what good people like Mary Cartaret would call good.  And Mary, leaning back in her chair with the recovered ball in her lap, was smiling at his confusion with an innocence and goodness of which he could have no doubt.

When he tried to account to himself for the remembrance he supposed it must have been the red hair that did it.

And up to the end and to the end of the end Rowcliffe never knew that, though he had been made subject to a sequence of relentless inhibitions and of suggestions overpowering in their nature and persistently sustained, it was ultimately by aid of that one incongruous and irresistible association that Mary Cartaret had cast her spell.

He had never really come under it until that moment.

* * * * *

July passed.  It was the end of August.  To the west Karva and Morfe High Moor were purple.  To the east the bare hillsides with their limestone ramparts smouldered in mist and sun, or shimmered, burning like any hillside of the south.  The light even soaked into the gray walls of Garth in its pastures.  The little plum-trees in the Vicarage orchard might have been olive trees twinkling in the sun.

Mary was in the Vicar’s bedroom, looking now at the door, and now at her own image in the wardrobe glass.  It was seven o’clock in the evening and she had chosen a perilous moment for the glass.  She wore a childlike frock of rough green silk; it had no collar but was cut square at the neck showing her white throat.  The square was bordered with an embroidered design of peacock’s eyes.  The parted waves of her red hair were burnished with hard brushing; its coils lay close, and smooth as a thick round cap.  It needed neither comb nor any ornament.