If only Gwenda had stayed with her!  But Gwenda had left the room when she saw Rowcliffe take out his stethescope.

And as it flashed on Ally what Rowcliffe was thinking of her, her heart stopped as if it was never going on again, then staggered, then gave a terrifying jump.

* * * * *

Rowcliffe had done with Ally’s little wrist.  He laid it down on the counterpane, not brutally at all, but gently, almost tenderly, as if it had been a thing exquisitely fragile and precious.

He rose to his feet and looked at her, and then, all of a sudden, as he looked, Rowcliffe became young again; charmingly young, almost boyish.  And, as if faintly amused at her youth, faintly touched by her fragility, he smiled.  With a mouth and with eyes from which all austerity had departed he smiled at Alice.

(It was all over.  He had done with her.  He could afford to be kind to her as he would have been kind to a little, frightened child.)

And Alice smiled back at him with her white face between the pale gold, serious bands of platted hair.

She was no longer frightened.  She forgot his austerity as if it had never been.  She saw that he hadn’t thought her awful in the least.  He couldn’t have looked at her like that if he had.

A sense of warmth, of stillness, of soft happiness flooded her body and her brain, as if the stream of life had ceased troubling and ran with an even rhythm.  As she lay back, her tormented heart seemed suddenly to sink into it and rest, to be part of it, poised on the stream.

Then, still looking down at her, he spoke.

“It’s pretty evident,” he said, “what’s the matter with you.”

“Is it?”

Her eyes were all wide.  He had frightened her again.

“It is,” he said.  “You’ve been starved.”

“Oh,” said little Ally, “is that all?”

And Rowcliffe smiled again, a little differently.

Mary said nothing.  She had found out long ago that silence was her strength.  Her small face brooded.  Impossible to tell what she was thinking.

“What has become of the other one, I wonder?” he said to himself.

He wanted to see her.  She was the intelligent one of the three sisters, and she was honest.  He had said to her quite plainly that he would want her.  Why, on earth, he wondered, had she gone away and left him with this sweet and good, this quite exasperatingly sweet and good woman who had told him nothing but lies?

He was aware that Mary Cartaret was sweet and good.  But he had found that sweet and good women were not invariably intelligent.  As for honesty, if they were always honest they would not always be sweet and good.

Through the door he opened for the eldest sister to pass out the other slipped in.  She had been waiting on the landing.

He stopped her.  He made a sign to her to come out with him.  He closed the door behind them.