The Vicar had desired supremacy in his Vicarage and he was at last supreme.  He was supreme over his daughter Gwenda.  The stubborn, intractable creature was at his feet.  She was his to bend or break or utterly destroy.  She who was capable of anything was capable of an indestructible devotion.  His times, the relentless, the monotonously recurring, were her times too.

If it had not been for Steven Rowcliffe she would have had none to call her own (except night time, when the Vicar slept).  But Rowcliffe had kept to his days for visiting the Vicarage.  He came twice or thrice a week; not counting Wednesdays.  Only, though Mary did not know it, he came as often as not in the evenings at dusk, just after the Vicar had been put to bed.  When it was wet he sat in the dining-room with Gwenda.  When it was fine he took her out on to the moor under Karva.

They always went the same way, up the green sheep-track that they knew; they always turned back at the same place, where the stream he had seen her jumping ran from the hill; and they always took the same time to go and turn.  They never stopped and never lingered; but went always at the same sharp pace, and kept the same distance from each other.  It was as if by saying to themselves, “Never any further than the stream; never any longer than thirty-five minutes; never any nearer than we are now,” they defined the limits of their whole relation.  Sometimes they hardly spoke as they walked.  They parted with casual words and with no touching of their hands and with the same thought unspoken—­“Till the next time.”

But these times which were theirs only did not count as time.  They belonged to another scale of feeling and another order of reality.  Their moments had another pulse, another rhythm and vibration.  They burned as they beat.  While they lasted Gwenda’s life was lived with an intensity that left time outside its measure.  Through this intensity she drew the strength to go on, to endure the unendurable with joy.

* * * * *

But Rowcliffe could not endure the unendurable at all.  He was savage when he thought of it.  That was her life and she would never get away from it.  She, who was born for the wild open air and for youth and strength and freedom, would be shut up in that house and tied to that half-paralyzed, half-imbecile old man forever.  It was damnable.  And he, Rowcliffe, could have prevented it if he had only known.  And if Mary had not lied to him.

And when his common sense warned him of their danger, and his conscience reproached him with leading her into it, he said to himself, “I can’t help it if it is dangerous.  It’s been taken out of my hands.  If somebody doesn’t drag her out of doors, she’ll get ill.  If somebody doesn’t talk to her she’ll grow morbid.  And there’s nobody but me.”

He sheltered himself in the immensity of her tragedy.  Its darkness covered them.  Her sadness and her isolation sanctified them.  Alice had her husband and her child.  Mary had—­all she wanted.  Gwenda had nobody but him.