“Perhaps you’ll come some night when Steven’s here.  You know he’s always glad to see you.”

The sting of it was in Mary’s watching eyes.  For, when you came to think of it, there was nothing else she could very well have said.

LXI

That year, when spring warmed into summer, Gwenda’s strength went from her.

She was always tired.  She fought with her fatigue and got the better of it, but in a week or two it returned.  Rowcliffe told her to rest and she rested, for a day or two, lying on the couch in the dining-room where Ally used to lie, and when she felt better she crawled out on to the moor and lay there.

One day she said to herself, “There’s Ally.  I’ll go and see how she’s getting on.”

She dragged herself up the hill to Upthorne.

It was a day of heat and hidden sunlight.  The moor and the marshes were drenched in the gray June mist.  The hillside wore soft vapor like a cloak hiding its nakedness.

At the top of the Three Fields the nave of the old barn showed as if lifted up and withdrawn into the distance.  But it was no longer solitary.  The thorn-tree beside it had burst into white flower; it shimmered far-off under the mist in the dim green field, like a magic thing, half-hidden and about to disappear, remaining only for the hour of its enchantment.

It gave her the same subtle and mysterious joy that she had had on the night she and Rowcliffe walked together and saw the thorn-trees on Greffington Edge white under the hidden moon.

The gray Farm-house was changed, for Jim Greatorex had got on.  He had built himself another granary on the north side of the mistal.  He built it long and low, of hewn stone, with a corrugated iron roof.  And he had made himself two fine new rooms, a dining-room and a nursery, one above the other, within the blind walls of the house where the old granary had been.  The walls were blind no longer, for he had knocked four large windows out of them.  And it was as if one-half of the house were awake and staring while the other half, in its old and alien beauty, dozed and dreamed under its scowling mullions.

As Gwenda came to it she wondered how the Farm could ever have seemed sinister and ghost-haunted; it had become so entirely the place of happy life.

Loud noises came from the open windows of the dining-room where the family were at tea; the barking of dogs, the competitive laughter of small children, a gurgling and crowing and spluttering; with now and then the sudden delicate laughter of Ally and the bellowing of Jim.

“Oh—­there’s Gwenda!” said Ally.

Jim stopped between a bellowing and a choking, for his mouth was full.

“Ay—­it’s ’er.”

He washed down his mouthful.  “Coom, Ally, and open door t’ ’er.”

But Ally did not come.  She had her year-old baby on her knees and was feeding him.