That night Gwenda dreamed that she saw Mary lying dead and with a dead child in the crook of her arm.

She woke in anguish and terror.

LVIII

Three years passed and six months.  The Cartarets had been in Garthdale nine years.

Gwenda Cartaret sat in the dining-room at the Vicarage alone with her father.

It was nearly ten o’clock of the March evening.  They waited for the striking of the clock.  It would be prayer time then, and after prayers the Vicar would drag himself upstairs to bed, and in the peace that slid into the room when he left it Gwenda would go on with her reading.

She had her sewing in her lap and her book, Bergson’s Evolution creatrice propped open before her on the table.  She sewed as she read.  For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not.  He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.  Toward ten his silence would be broken by a continual sighing and yearning.  The Vicar longed for prayer time to come and end his day.  But he had decreed that prayer time was ten o’clock and he would not have permitted it to come a minute sooner.

He nursed a book on his knees, but he made no pretence of reading it.  He had taken off his glasses and sat with his hands folded, in an attitude of utter resignation to his own will.

In the kitchen Essy Gale sat by the dying fire and waited for the stroke of ten.  And as she waited she stitched at the torn breeches of her little son.

Essy had come back to the house where she had been turned away.  For her mother was wanted by Mrs. Greatorex at Upthorne and what Mrs. Greatorex wanted she got.  There were two more children now at the Farm and work enough for three women in the house.  And Essy, with all her pride, had not been too proud to come back.  She had no feeling but pity for the old man, her master, who had bullied her and put her to shame.  If it pleased God to afflict him that was God’s affair, and, even as a devout Wesleyan, Essy considered that God had about done enough.

As Essy sat and stitched, she smiled, thinking of Greatorex’s son who lay in her bed in the little room over the kitchen.  Miss Gwenda let her have him with her on the nights when Mrs. Gale slept up at the Farm.

It was quiet in the Vicarage kitchen.  The door into the back yard was shut, the door that Essy used to keep open when she listened for a footstep and a whisper.  That door had betrayed her many a time when the wind slammed it to.

Essy’s heart was quiet as the heart of her sleeping child.  She had forgotten how madly it had leaped to her lover’s footsteps, how it had staggered at the slamming of the door.  She had forgotten the tears that she had shed when Alice’s wild music had rocked the house, and what the Vicar had said to her that night when she spilled the glass of water in the study.