“If it goes on like this, they’ll have to send for him,” she said.

But it had gone on, the three weeks had passed, and yet they had not sent.  The Vicar had put his foot down.  He wouldn’t have the doctor.  He knew better than a dozen doctors what was the matter with his daughter Alice.

Alice said nothing.  She simply waited.  As if some profound and dead-sure instinct had sustained her, she waited, sickening.

And on the last night of the third week she fainted.  She had dragged herself upstairs to bed, staggered across the little landing and fallen on the threshold of her room.

They kept her in bed next day.  At one o’clock she refused her chicken-broth.  She would neither eat nor drink.  And a little before three Gwenda went for the doctor.

She had not told Alice she was going.  She had not told anybody.

XV

She had to walk, for Mary had taken her bicycle.  Nobody knew where Mary had gone or when she had started or when she would be back.

But the four miles between Garth and Morfe were nothing to Gwenda, who would walk twenty for her own amusement.  She would have stretched the way out indefinitely if she could; she would have piled Garthdale Moor on Greffington Edge and Karva on the top of them and put them between Garth and Morfe, so violent was her fear of Steven Rowcliffe.

She had no longer any desire to see him or to be seen by him.  He had seen her twice too often, and too early and too late.  After being caught on the moor at dawn, it was preposterous that she should show herself in the doorway of Upthorne at night.

How was he to know that she hadn’t done it on purpose?  Girls did these things.  Poor little Ally had done them.  And it was because Ally had done them that she had been taken and hidden away here where she couldn’t do them any more.

But—­couldn’t she?  Gwenda stood still, staring in her horror as the frightful thought struck her that Ally could, and that she would, the very minute she realised young Rowcliffe.  And he would think—­not that it mattered in the least what he thought—­he would think that there were two of them.

If only, she said to herself, if only young Rowcliffe were a married man.  Then even Ally couldn’t—­

Not that she blamed poor little Ally.  She looked on little Ally as the victim of a malign and tragic tendency, the fragile vehicle of an alien and overpowering impulse.  Little Ally was doomed.  It wasn’t her fault if she was made like that.

And this time it wouldn’t be her fault at all.  Their father would have driven her.  Gwenda hated him for his persecution and exposure of the helpless creature.

She walked on thinking.

It wouldn’t end with Ally.  They were all three exposed and persecuted.  For supposing—­it wasn’t likely, but supposing—­that this Rowcliffe man was the sort of man she liked, supposing—­what was still more unlikely—­that he was the sort of man who would like her, where would be the good of it?  Her father would spoil it all.  He spoiled everything.