And all the time, through the perilous months, Nature, mindful of her own, tightened her hold on Ally through Ally’s fear.  Ally was afraid to be left alone with it.  Therefore she never let Greatorex out of her sight if she could help it.  She followed him from room to room of the sad house where he was painting and papering and whitewashing to make it fine for her.  Where he was she had to be.  Stowed away in some swept corner, she would sit with her sweet and sorrowful eyes fixed on him as he labored.  She trotted after him through the house and out into the mistal and up the Three Fields.  She would crouch on a heap of corn-sacks, wrapped in a fur coat, and watch him at his work in the stable and the cow-byre.  In her need to immortalise this passion she could not have done better.  Her utter dependence on him flattered and softened the distrustful, violent and headstrong man.  Her one chance, and Ally knew it, was to cling.  If she had once shamed him by her fastidious shrinking she would have lost him; for, as Mrs. Gale had told her long ago, you could do nothing with Jimmy when he was shamed.  Maggie, for all her coarseness, had contrived to shame him; so had Essy in her freedom and her pride.  Ally’s clinging, so far from irritating or obstructing him, drew out the infinite pity and tenderness he had for all sick and helpless things.  He could no more have pushed little Ally from him than he could have kicked a mothering ewe, or stamped on a new dropped lamb.  He would call to her if she failed to come.  He would hold out his big hand to her as he would have held it to a child.  Her smallness, her fineness and fragility enchanted him.  The palms of her hands had the smoothness and softness of silk, and they made a sound like silk as they withdrew themselves with a lingering, stroking touch from his.  He still felt, with a fearful and admiring wonder, the difference of her flesh from his.

To be sure Jim’s tenderness was partly penitential.  Only it was Ally alone who had moved him to a perfect and unbearable contrition.  For the two women whom he had loved and left Greatorex had felt nothing but a passing pang.  For the woman he had made his wife he would go always with a wound in his soul.

And with Ally, too, the supernatural came to Nature’s aid.  Her fear had a profound strain of the uncanny in it, and Jim’s bodily presence was her shelter from her fear.  And as it bound them flesh to flesh, closer and closer, it wedded them in one memory, one consolation and one soul.

* * * * *

One day she had followed him into the stable, and on the window-sill, among all the cobwebs where it had been put away and forgotten, she found the little bottle of chlorodyne.

She took it up, and Jim scolded her gently as if she had been a child.

“Yore lil haands is always maddlin’.  Yo’ put thot down.”

“What is it?”

“It’s poison, is thot.  There’s enoof there t’ kill a maan.  Yo’ put it down whan I tall yo’.”