And Rowcliffe smiled grimly at young Grierson and his Platonic passion.  He said to himself, “If I’d only known.  If I’d only had the sense to wait six months.  Grierson would have done just as well for Molly.”

Still, though Grierson had come too late, he welcomed him and his Platonic passion.  It wasn’t good for Grierson but it was good for Molly.  At least, he supposed it was better for her than nothing.  And for him it was infinitely better.  It kept Grierson off Gwenda.

* * * * *

Young Grierson was right when he said that Gwenda didn’t see that he was there.  He had been two years in Garthdale and she was as far from seeing it as ever.  He didn’t mind; he was even amused by her indifference, only he couldn’t help thinking that it was rather odd of her, considering that he was there.

The village, as simple in its thinking as young Grierson, shared his view.  It thought that it was something more than odd.  And it had a suspicion that Mrs. Rowcliffe was at the bottom of it.  She wouldn’t be happy if she didn’t get that young man away from her sister.  The village hinted that it wouldn’t be for the first time.

* * * * *

But in two years, with the gradual lifting of the pressure that had numbed her, Gwenda had become aware.  Not of young Grierson, but of her own tragedy, of the slow life that dragged her, of its relentless motion and its mass.  Now that her father’s need of her was intermittent she was alive to the tightness of the tie.  It had been less intolerable when it had bound her tighter; when she hadn’t had a moment; when it had dragged her all the time.  Its slackening was torture.  She pulled then, and was jerked on her chain.

It was not only that Rowcliffe’s outburst had waked her and made her cruelly aware.  He had timed it badly, in her moment of revived lucidity, the moment when she had become vulnerable again.  She was the more sensitive because of her previous apathy, as if she had died and was new-born to suffering and virgin to pain.

What hurt her most was her father’s gentleness.  She could stand his fits of irritation and obstinacy; they braced her, they called forth her will.  But she was defenseless against his pathos, and he knew it.  He had phrases that wrung her heart.  “You’re a good girl, Gwenda.”  “I’m only an irritable old man, my dear.  You mustn’t mind what I say.”  She suffered from the incessant drain on her pity; for she wanted all her will if she was to stand against Rowcliffe.  Pity was a dangerous solvent in which her will sank and was melted away.

There were moments when she saw herself as two women.  One had still the passion and the memory of freedom.  The other was a cowed and captive creature who had forgotten; whose cramped motions guided her; whose instinct of submission she abhorred.

* * * * *