And Greatorex was entering it every day, for news of him to take to Alice at Upthorne.  Gwenda had come back and would never go again, and it was she and not Mary who had proved herself devoted.  And it was not his wisdom but Greatorex’s scandalous passion for her that had saved Alice.  As for leaving the parish because of the scandal, the Vicar would never leave it now.  He was tied there in his Vicarage by his stroke.

It left him with a paralysis of the right side and an utter confusion and enfeeblement of intellect.

In three months he recovered partially from the paralysis.  But the flooding of his brain had submerged or carried away whole tracts of recent memory, and the last vivid, violent impression—­Alice’s affair—­was wiped out.

There was no reason why he should not stay on.  What was left of his memory told him that Alice was at the Vicarage, and he was worried because he never saw her about.

He did not know that the small gray house above the churchyard had become a place of sinister and scandalous tragedy; that his name and his youngest daughter’s name were bywords in three parishes; and that Alice had been married in conspicuous haste by the horrified Vicar of Greffington to a man whom only charitable people regarded as her seducer.

And the order of time had ceased for him with this breach in the sequence of events.  He had a dim but enduring impression that it was always prayer time.  No hours marked the long stretches of blank darkness and of confused and crowded twilight.  Only, now and then, a little light pulsed feebly in his brain, a flash that renewed itself day by day; and day by day, in a fresh experience, he was aware that he was ill.

It was as if the world stood still and his mind moved.  It “wandered,” as they said.  And in its wanderings it came upon strange gaps and hollows and fantastic dislocations, landslips where a whole foreground had given way.  It looked at these things with a serene and dreamlike wonder and passed on.

And in the background, on some half-lit, isolated tract of memory, raised above ruin, and infinitely remote, he saw the figure of his youngest daughter.  It was a girlish, innocent figure, and though, because of the whiteness of its face, he confused it now and then with the figure of Alice’s dead mother, his first wife, he was aware that it was really Alice.

This figure of Alice moved him with a vague and tender yearning.

What puzzled and worried him was that in his flashes of luminous experience he didn’t see her there.  And it was then that the Vicar would make himself wonderful and piteous by asking, a dozen times a day, “Where’s Ally?”

For by the stroke that made him wonderful and piteous the Vicar’s character and his temperament were changed.  Nothing was left of Ally’s tyrant and Robina’s victim, the middle-aged celibate, filled with the fury of frustration and profoundly sorry for himself.  His place was taken by a gentle old man, an old man of an appealing and childlike innocence, pure from all lust, from all self-pity, enjoying, actually enjoying, the consideration that his stroke had brought him.