“I’ll tell yo anoother quare thing.  ‘T’ assn’t got mooch t’ do wi’ good and baad.  T’ drink ‘ll nat drive it from yo, an’ sin’ll nat drive it from yo.  Saw I raakon ‘t is mooch t’ saame thing as t’ graace o’ Gawd.”

“Did the grace of God go away from you when you married, Jim?”

“Mebbe t’ would ’aave ef I’d roon aaffter it.  ’Tis a tricky thing is Gawd’s graace.”

“But it’s gone,” she said.  “You gave your soul for Ally when you married her.”

He smiled.  “I toald ‘er I’d give my sawl t’ marry ’er,” he said.

LXII

As she went home she tried to recapture the magic of the flowering thorn-trees.  But it had gone and she could not be persuaded that it would come again.  She was still too young to draw joy from the memory of joy, and what Greatorex had told her seemed incredible.

She said to herself, “Is it going to be taken from me like everything else?”

And a dreadful duologue went on in her.

“It looks like it.”

“But it was mine.  It was mine like nothing else.”

“It never had anything for you but what you gave it.”

“Am I to go on giving the whole blessed time?  Am I never to have anything for myself?”

“There never is anything for anybody but what they give.  Or what they take from somebody else.  You should have taken.  You had your chance.”

“I’d have died, rather.”

“Do you call this living?”

“I have lived.”

“He hasn’t.  Why did you sacrifice him?”

“For Mary.”

“It wasn’t for Mary.  It was for yourself.  For your own wretched soul.”

“For his soul.”

“How much do you suppose Mary cares about his soul?  It would have had a chance with you.  Its one chance.”

The unconsoling voice had the last word.  For it was not in answer to it that a certain phrase came into her brooding mind.

“I couldn’t do a caddish thing like that.”

It puzzled her.  She had said it to Steven that night.  But it came to her now attached to an older memory.  Somebody had said it to her before then.  Years before.

She remembered.  It was Ally.

LXIII

A year passed.  It was June again.

For more than a year there had been rumors of changes in Morfe.  The doctor talked of going.  He was always talking of going and nobody had yet believed that he would go.  This time, they said, he was serious, it had been a toss-up whether he stayed or went.  But in the end he stayed.  Things had happened in Rowcliffe’s family.  His mother had died and his wife had had a son.

Rowcliffe’s son was the image of Rowcliffe.

The doctor had no brothers or sisters, and by his mother’s death he came into possession both of his father’s income and of hers.  He had now more than a thousand a year over and above what he earned.