In her soul she knew that she was done for if she once admitted and gave in to her fear of Upthorne and of her husband’s house, or if she were ever to feel again her fear of Greatorex, which was the most intolerable of all her fears.  It was as if Nature itself were aware that, if Ally were not dispossessed of that terror before Greatorex’s child was born her own purpose would be insecure; as if the unborn child, the flesh and blood of the Greatorexes that had entered into her, protested against her disastrous cowardice.

So, without Ally being in the least aware of it, Ally’s mind, struggling toward sanity, fabricated one enormous fear, the fear of her father’s death, a fear that she could own and face, and set it up in place of that secret and dangerous thing which was the fear of life itself.

Ally, insisting a dozen times a day that she had killed poor Papa, was completely taken in by this play of her surreptitiously self-preserving soul.  Even Rowcliffe was taken in by it.  He called it a morbid obsession.  And he began to wonder whether he had not been mistaken about Ally after all, whether her nature was not more subtle and sensitive than he had guessed, more intricately and dangerously mixed.

For the sadness of the desolate land, of the naked hillsides, of the moor marshes with their ghostly mists; the brooding of the watchful, solitary house, the horror of haunted twilights, of nightfall and of midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his cattle and she lay alone under the white ceiling that sagged above her bed and heard the weak wind picking at the pane; her fear of Maggie and of what Maggie had been to Greatorex and might be again; her fear of the savage, violent and repulsive elements in the man who was her god; her fear of her own repulsion; the tremor of her recoiling nerves; premonitions of her alien blood, the vague melancholy of her secret motherhood; they were all mingled together and hidden from her in the vast gloom of her one fear.

And once the dominant terror was set up, her instinct found a thousand ways of strengthening it.  Through her adoration of her lover her mind had become saturated with his mournful consciousness of sin.  In their moments of contrition they were both convinced that they would be punished.  But Ally had borne her sin superbly; she had declared that it was hers and hers only, and that she and not Greatorex would be punished.  And now the punishment had come.  She persuaded herself that her father’s death was the retribution Heaven required.

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