* * * * *

She had never had anybody but him.  For in the beginning the Vicar and his daughters had failed to make friends among their own sort.  Up in the Dale there had been few to make, and those few Mr. Cartaret had contrived to alienate one after another by his deplorable legend and by the austere unpleasantness of his personality.  People had not been prepared for intimacy with a Vicar separated so outrageously from his third wife.  Nobody knew whether it was he or his third wife who had been outrageous, but the Vicar’s manner was not such as to procure for him the benefit of any doubt.  The fact remained that the poor man was handicapped by an outrageous daughter, and Alice’s behavior was obviously as much the Vicar’s fault as his misfortune.  And it had been felt that Gwenda had not done anything to redeem her father’s and her sister’s eccentricities, and that Mary, though she was a nice girl, had hardly done enough.  For the last eighteen months visits at the Vicarage had been perfunctory and very brief, month by month they had diminished, and before Mary’s marriage they had almost ceased.

Still, Mary’s marriage had appeased the parish.  Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe had atoned for the third Mrs. Cartaret’s suspicious absence and for Gwenda Cartaret’s flight.  Lady Frances Gilbey’s large wing had further protected Gwenda.

Then, suddenly, the tale of Alice Cartaret and Greatorex went round, and it was as if the Vicarage had opened and given up its secret.

At first, the sheer extremity of his disaster had sheltered the Vicar from his own scandal.  Through all Garthdale and Rathdale, in the Manors and the Lodges and the Granges, in the farmhouses and the cottages, in the inns and little shops, there was a stir of pity and compassion.  The people who had left off calling at the Vicarage called again with sympathy and kind inquiries.  They were inclined to forget how impossible the Cartarets had been.  They were sorry for Gwenda.  But they had been checked in their advances by Gwenda’s palpable recoil.  She had no time to give to callers.  Her father had taken all her time.  The callers considered themselves absolved from calling.

Slowly, month by month, the Vicarage was drawn back into its silence and its loneliness.  It assumed, more and more, its aspect of half-sinister, half-sordid tragedy.  The Vicar’s calamity no longer sheltered him.  It took its place in the order of accepted and irremediable events.

* * * * *

Only the village preserved its sympathy alive.  The village, that obscure congregated soul, long-suffering to calamity, welded together by saner instincts and profound in memory, the soul that inhabited the small huddled, humble houses, divided from the Vicarage by no more than the graveyard of its dead, the village remembered and it knew.

It remembered how the Vicar had come and gone over its thresholds, how no rain nor snow nor storm had stayed him in his obstinate and punctual visiting.  And whereas it had once looked grimly on its Vicar, it looked kindly on him now.  It endured him for his daughter Gwenda’s sake, in spite of what it knew.