The Vicar looked at his watch.  He turned to Rowcliffe.

“Is that fellow coming, or is he not?”

“He won’t funk it,” said Rowcliffe.

He turned.  His eyes met Gwenda’s.  “I think I can answer for his coming.”

“Do you mean Jim Greatorex?” she said.

“Yes.”

“What is it that he won’t funk?”

She looked from one to the other.  Nobody answered her.  It was as if they were, all three, afraid of her.

“I see,” she said.  “If you ask me I think he’d much better not come.”

“My dear Gwenda——­” The Vicar was deferent to the power that had dragged Ally’s confession from her.

“We must get through with this.  The sooner the better.  It’s what we’re all here for.”

“I know.  Still—­I think you’ll have to leave it.”

“Leave it?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“We can’t leave it,” said Rowcliffe.  “Something’s got to be done.”

The Vicar groaned and Rowcliffe had pity on him.

“If you’d like me to do it—­I can interview him.”

“I wish you would.”

“Very well.”  He moved uneasily.  “I’d better see him here, hadn’t I?”

“You’d better not see him anywhere,” said Gwenda.  “He can’t marry her.”

She held them all three by the sheer shock of it.

The Vicar spoke first.  “What do you mean, ‘he can’t’?  He must.”

“He must not.  Ally doesn’t want to marry him.  He asked her long ago and she wouldn’t have him.”

“Do you mean,” said Rowcliffe, surprised out of his reticence, “before this happened?”

“Yes.”

“And she wouldn’t have him?”

“No.  She was afraid of him.”

“She was afraid of him—­and yet——­” It was Mary who spoke now.

“Yes, Mary.  And yet—­she cared for him.”

The Vicar turned on her.

“You’re as bad as she is.  How can you bring yourself to speak of it, if you’re a modest girl?  You’ve just told us that your sister’s shameless.  Are we to suppose that you’re defending her?”

“I am defending her.  There’s nobody else to do it.  You’ve all set on her and tortured her——­”

“Not all, Gwenda,” said Rowcliffe.  But she did not heed him.

“She’d have told you everything if you hadn’t frightened her.  You haven’t had an atom of pity for her.  You’ve never thought of her for a minute.  You’ve been thinking of yourselves.  You might have killed her.  And you didn’t care.”

The Vicar looked at her.

“It’s you, Gwenda, who don’t care.”

“About what she’s done, you mean?  I don’t.  You ought to be gentle with her, Papa.  You drove her to it.”

Rowcliffe answered.

“We’ll not say what drove her, Gwenda.”

“She was driven,” she said.

“’Let no man say he is tempted of God when he is driven by his own lusts and enticed,’” said the Vicar.