Her isolation was now extreme.  She had had nothing to give to any friends she might have made.  Rowcliffe had taken all that was left of her.  And now, when intercourse was possible, it was they who had withdrawn.  They shared Mr. Grierson’s inability to make her out.  They had heard rumors; they imagined things; they remembered also.  She was the girl who had raced all over the country with Dr. Rowcliffe, the girl whom Dr. Rowcliffe, for all their racing, had not cared to marry.  She was the girl who had run away from home to live with a dubious step-mother; and she was the sister of that awful Mrs. Greatorex, who—­well, everybody knew what Mrs. Greatorex was.

Gwenda Cartaret, like her younger sister, had been talked about.  Not so much in the big houses of the Dale.  The queer facts had been tossed up and down a smokeroom for one season and then dropped.  In the big houses they didn’t remember Gwenda Cartaret.  They only remembered to forget her.

But in the little shops and in the little houses in Morfe there had been continual whispering.  They said that even after Dr. Rowcliffe’s marriage to that nice wife of his, who was her own sister, the two had been carrying on.  If there wasn’t any actual harm done, and maybe there wasn’t, the doctor had been running into danger.  He was up at Garthdale more than he need be now that the old Vicar was about again.  And they had been seen together.  The head gamekeeper at Garthdale had caught them more than once out on the moor, and after dark too.  It was said in the little houses that it wasn’t the doctor’s fault. (In the big houses judgment had been more impartial, but Morfe was loyal to its doctor.) It was hers, every bit, you might depend on it.  Of Rowcliffe it was said that maybe he’d been tempted, but he was a good man, was Dr. Rowcliffe, and he’d stopped in time.  Because they didn’t know what Gwenda Cartaret was capable of, they believed, like the Vicar, that she was capable of anything.

It was only in her own village that they knew.  The head gamekeeper had never told his tale in Garth.  It would have made him too unpopular.

* * * * *

Gwenda Cartaret remained unaware of what was said.  Rumor protected her by cutting her off from its own sources.

And she had other consolations besides her ignorance.  So long as she knew that Rowcliffe cared for her and always had cared, it did not seem to matter to her so much that he had married Mary.  She actually considered that, of the two, Mary was the one to be pitied; it was so infinitely worse to be married to a man who didn’t care for you than not to be married to a man who did.

Of course, there was the tie.  Her sister had outward and visible possession of him.  But she said to herself “I wouldn’t give what I have for that, if I can’t have both.”

And of course there was Steven, and Steven’s misery which was more unbearable to her than her own.  At least she thought it was more unbearable.  She didn’t ask herself how bearable it would have been if Steven’s marriage had brought him a satisfaction that denied her and cast her out.