Then she shut to the door of the wardrobe (for the back view that was to reassure her as to the utter prettiness of her shoulders and the nape of her neck), and it was at that moment that she saw him, reflected behind her in the long looking-glass.

She screamed and dropped the hand-glass.  She heard it break itself at her feet.

“Papa,” she cried, “how you frightened me!”

It was not so much that he had caught her smiling at her own face, it was that his face, seen in the looking-glass, was awful.  And besides being awful it was evil.  Even to Ally’s innocence it was evil.  If it had been any other man Ally’s instinct would have said that he looked horrid without Ally knowing or caring to know what her instinct meant.  But the look on her father’s face was awful because it was mysterious.  Neither she nor her instinct had a word for it.  There was cruelty in it, and, besides cruelty, some quality nameless and unrecognisable, subtle and secret, and yet crude somehow and vivid.  The horror of it made her forget that he had caught her in one of the most deplorably humiliating situations in which a young girl can be caught—­deliberately manufacturing smiles for her own amusement.

“You’ve no business to be here,” said the Vicar.

He picked up the broken hand-glass, and as he looked at it the cruelty and the nameless quality passed out of his face as if a hand had smoothed it, and it became suddenly weak and pathetic, the face of a child whose precious magic thing another child has played with and broken.

Then Alice remembered that the hand-glass had been her mother’s.

“I’m sorry I’ve broken it, Papa, if you liked it.”

Her voice recalled him to himself.

“Ally,” he said, “what am I to think of you?  Are you a fool—­or what?”

The sting of it lashed Ally’s brain to a retort. (All that she had needed hitherto to be effective was a little red blood in her veins, and she had got it now.)

“I’d be a fool,” she said, “if I cared two straws what you think of me, since you can’t see what I am.  I’m sorry if I’ve broken your old hand-glass, though I didn’t break it.  You broke it yourself.”

Carrying her golden top-knot like a crown, she left the room.

The Vicar took the broken hand-glass and hid it in a drawer.  He was sorry for himself.  The only impression left on his mind was that his daughter Ally had been cruel to him.

* * * * *

But Ally didn’t care a rap what he thought of her, or what impression she had left on his mind.  She was much too happy.  Besides, if you once began caring what Papa thought there would be no peace for anybody.  He was so impossible that he didn’t count.  He wasn’t even an effective serpent in her Paradise.  He might crawl all over it (as indeed he did crawl), but he left no trail.  The thought of how he had caught her at the looking-glass might be disagreeable, but it couldn’t slime those holy lawns.  Neither could it break the ecstasy of Wednesday, that heavenly day.  Nothing could break it as long as Dr. Rowcliffe continued to look in at tea-time and her father to explore the furthest borders of his parish.