Gwendolen had a pang of compassion.

“Dear lamb,” she said. “That isn’t any good.  Fresh air won’t do it.  You’d much better wait till Papa gets a cold.  Then you can catch it.”

“It’ll be his fault anyway,” said Alice.  “Serve him jolly well right if I get pneumonia.”

“Pneumonia doesn’t come to those who want it.  I wonder what’s wrong with Essy.”

Alice was tired and sullen.  “You’d better ask Jim Greatorex,” she said.

“What do you mean, Ally?”

But Ally had set her small face hard.

“Can’t you he sorry for her?” said Gwenda.

“Why should I be sorry for her? She’s all right.”

She had sorrow enough, but none to waste on Essy.  Essy’s way was easy.  Essy had only to slink out to the back door and she could have her will. She didn’t have to get pneumonia.

XII

John Greatorex did not die that night.  He had no mind to die:  he was a man of stubborn pugnacity and he fought his pneumonia.

The long gray house at Upthorne looks over the marshes of the high land above Garth.  It stands alone, cut off by the marshes from the network of gray walls that links the village to the hill farms.

The light in its upper window burned till dawn, a sign to the brooding and solitary land.  Up there, in the low room with its sunken ceiling, John Greatorex lay in the big bed and rallied a little as the clean air from the moors lapped him like water.  For the doctor had thrown open all the windows of the house before he left.  Presently Mrs. Gale, the untrained village nurse, would come and shut them in terror, and John Greatorex’s pneumonia would get the upper hand.  That was how the fight went on, with Steven Rowcliffe on John Greatorex’s side and Mrs. Gale for the pneumonia.  It was ten to one against John Greatorex and the doctor, for John Greatorex was most of the time unconscious and the doctor called but once or twice a day, while Mrs. Gale was always there to shut the windows as fast as he opened them.  In the length and breadth of the Dale there wasn’t another woman who would not have done the same.  She was secure from criticism.  If she didn’t know how to nurse pneumonia, who did?  Seeing that her own husband had died of it.

Young Rowcliffe was a dalesman and he knew his people.  In six months his face had grown stiff in the struggle with them.  It was making his voice stern and his eyes hard, so that they could see nothing round him but stupidity and distrust and an obstinacy even greater than his own.

Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for it.  In his big provincial hospital he had had it practically his own way.  He had faced a thousand horrible and intractable diseases with a thousand appliances and with an army of assistants and trained nurses under him.  And if in his five years’ private practice in Leeds he had come to grips with human nature, it had been at any rate a fair fight.  If his work was harder his responsibility was less.  He still had trained nurses under him; and if a case was beyond him there were specialists with whom he could consult.