Then their hands met.

“You want to see me?”

“I did—­” She was writhing piteously in the trap.

“You’d better come into the surgery.  There’s a fire there.”

He wasn’t going to keep her out there in the cold; and he wasn’t going to walk back with her to the Vicarage.  He didn’t want to meet the Vicar and have the door shut in his face.  Rowcliffe, informed by Mrs. Blenkiron, was aware, long before Gwenda had warned him, that he ran this risk.  The Vicar’s funniness was a byword in the parish.

But he left the door ajar.

“Well,” he said gently, “what is it?”

“Shall you be seeing Jim Greatorex soon?”

“I might.  Why?”

She told her tale again; she told it in little bursts of excitement punctuated with shy hesitations.  She told it with all sorts of twists and turns, winding and entangling herself in it and coming out again breathless and frightened, like a lost creature that has been dragged through the brake.  And there were long pauses when Alice put her head on one side, considering, as if she held her tale in her hands and were looking at it and wondering whether she really could go on.

“And what is it you want me to do?” said Rowcliffe finally.

“To ask him.”

“Hadn’t you better ask him yourself?”

“Would he do it for me?”

“Of course he would.”

“I wonder.  Perhaps—­if I asked him prettily—­”

“Oh, then—­he couldn’t help himself.”

There was a pause.  Rowcliffe, a little ashamed of himself, looked at the floor, and Alice looked at Rowcliffe and tried to fathom the full depth of his meaning from his face.  That there was a depth and that there was a meaning she never doubted.  This time Rowcliffe missed the pathos of her gray eyes.

An idea had come to him.

“Look here—­Miss Cartaret—­if you can get Jim Greatorex to sing for you, if you can get him to take an interest in the concert or in any mortal thing besides beer and whisky, you’ll be doing the best day’s work you ever did in your life.”

“Do you think I could?” she said.

“I think you could probably do anything with him if you gave your mind to it.”

He meant it.  He meant it.  That was really his opinion of her.  Her lifted face was radiant as she drank bliss at one draught from the cup he held to her.  But she was not yet satisfied.

“You’d like me to do it?”

“I should very much.”

His voice was firm, but his eyes looked uneasy and ashamed.

“Would you like me to get him back in the choir?”

“I’d like you to get him back into anything that’ll keep him out of mischief.”

She raised her chin.  There was a more determined look on her small, her rather insignificant face than he would have thought to see there.

She rose.

“Very well,” she said superbly.  “I’ll do it.”