The peace of Paradise came down on the Vicarage every Wednesday the very minute the garden gate had swung back behind the Vicar.  He started so early and he was back so late that there was never any chance of his encountering young Rowcliffe.

* * * * *

To be sure, young Rowcliffe hardly ever said a word to her.  He always talked to Mary or to Gwenda.  But there was nothing in his reticence to disturb Ally’s ecstasy.  It was bliss to sit and look at Rowcliffe and to hear him talk.  When she tried to talk to him herself her brain swam and she became unhappy and confused.  Intellectual effort was destructive to the blessed state, which was pure passivity, untroubled contemplation in its early stages, before the oncoming of rapture.

The fact that Mary and Gwenda could talk to him and talk intelligently showed how little they cared for him or were likely to care, and how immeasurably far they were from the supreme act of adoration.  Similarly, the fact that Rowcliffe could talk to Mary and to Gwenda showed how little he cared.  If he had cared, if he were ever going to care as Ally understood caring, his brain would have swum like hers and his intellect would have abandoned him.

Whereas, it was when he turned to Ally that he hadn’t a word to say, any more than she had, and that he became entangled in his talk, and that the intellect he tried to summon to him tottered and vanished at his call.

Another thing—­when he caught her looking at him (and though Ally was careful he did catch her now and then) he always either lowered his eyelids or looked away.  He was afraid to look at her; and that, as everybody knew, was an infallible sign.  Why, Ally was afraid to look at him, only she couldn’t help it.  Her eyes were dragged to the terror and the danger.

So Ally reasoned in her Paradise.

For when Rowcliffe was once gone her brain was frantically busy.  It never gave her any rest.  From the one stuff of its dreams it span an endless shining thread; from the one thread it wove an endless web of visions.  From nothing at all it built up drama after drama.  It was all beautiful what Ally’s brain did, all noble, all marvelously pure. (The Vicar would have been astonished if he had known how pure.) There was no sullen and selfish Ally in Ally’s dreams.  They were all of sacrifice, of self-immolation, of beautiful and noble things done for Rowcliffe, of suffering for Rowcliffe, of dying for him.  All without Rowcliffe being very palpably and positively there.

It was only at night, when Ally’s brain slept among its dreams, that Rowcliffe’s face leaned near to hers without ever touching it, and his arms made as if they clasped her and never met.  Even then, always at the first intangible approach of him, she woke, terrified because dreams go by contraries.

“Is your sister always so silent?” Rowcliffe asked that Wednesday (the Wednesday when Ally had been caught).