But when she came to and saw herself seeing, she said, “At least this is mine.  Nobody, not even Steven, can take it away from me.”

* * * * *

She also reminded herself that she had Alice.

She meant Alice Greatorex.  Alice Cartaret, oppressed by her own “awfulness,” had loved her with a sullen selfish love, the love of a frustrated and unhappy child.  But there was no awfulness in Alice Greatorex.  In the fine sanity of happiness she showed herself as good as gold.

Marriage, that had made Mary hard, made Alice tender.  Mary was wrapped up in her husband and her house, and in her social relations and young Grierson’s Platonic passion, so tightly wrapped that these things formed round her an impenetrable shell.  They hid a secret and inaccessible Mary.

Alice was wrapped up in her husband and children, in the boy of three who was so like Gwenda, and in the baby girl who was so like Greatorex.  But through them she had become approachable.  She had the ways of some happy household animal, its quick rushes of affection, and its gaze, the long, spiritual gaze of its maternity, mysterious and appealing.  She loved Gwenda with a sad-eyed, remorseful love.  She said to herself, “If I hadn’t been so awful, Gwenda might have married Steven.”  She saw the appalling extent of Gwenda’s sacrifice.  She saw it as it was, monstrous, absurd, altogether futile.

It was the futility of it that troubled Alice most.  Even if Gwenda had been capable of sacrificing herself for Mary, which had been by no means her intention, that would have been futile too.  Alice was of Rowcliffe’s opinion that young Grierson would have done every bit as well for Mary.

Better, for Mary had no children.

“And how,” said Alice, “could she expect to have them?”

She saw in Mary’s childlessness not only God’s but Nature’s justice.

* * * * *

There were moments when Mary saw it too.  But she left God out of it and called it Nature’s cruelty.

If it was not really Gwenda.  For in flashes of extreme lucidity Mary put it down to Rowcliffe’s coldness.

And she had come to know that Gwenda was responsible for that.

LVI

But one day in April, in the fourth year of her marriage, Mary sent for Gwenda.

Rowcliffe was out on his rounds.  She had thought of that.  She was fond of having Gwenda with her in Rowcliffe’s absence, when she could talk to her about him in a way that assumed his complete indifference to Gwenda and utter devotion to herself.  Gwenda was used to this habit of Mary’s and thought nothing of it.

She found her in Rowcliffe’s study, the room that she knew better than any other in his house.  The window was closed.  The panes cut up the colors of the orchard and framed them in small squares.