He held out his hand.

“I don’t say, Miss Cartaret, that you’ll reclaim him.”

“Nor I. But—­if you want me to, I’ll try.”

They parted on it.

Rowcliffe smiled as he closed the surgery door behind him.

“That’ll give her something else to think about,” he said to himself.  “And it’ll take her all her time.”

XXIV

The next Sunday, early in the afternoon, Alice went, all by herself, to Upthorne.

Hitherto she had disliked going to Upthorne by herself.  She had no very subtle feeling for the aspects of things; but there was something about the road to Upthorne that repelled her.  A hundred yards or so above the schoolhouse it turned, leaving behind it the wide green bottom and winding up toward the naked moor.  To the north, on her right, it narrowed and twisted; the bed of the beck lay hidden.  A thin scrub of low thorn trees covered the lower slopes of the further hillside.  Here and there was a clearing and a cottage or a farm.  On her left she had to pass the dead mining station, the roofless walls, the black window gaps, the melancholy haunted colonnades, the three chimneys of the dead furnaces, square cornered, shooting straight and high as the bell-towers of some hill city of the South, beautiful and sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin.  Then the sallow winter marshes.  South of the marshes were the high moors.  Their flanks showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines.  At intervals, along the line of the hillside, masses of rubble rose in hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged by blasting.  Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the village of Upthorne lay unseen.

And hitherto, in all that immense and inhuman desolation nothing (to Alice) had been more melancholy, more sinister, more haunted than the house where John Greatorex had died.  With its gray, unsleeping face, its lidless eyes, staring out over the marshes, it had lost (for Alice) all likeness to a human habitation.  It repudiated the living; it remembered; it kept a grim watch with its dead.

But Alice’s mind, acutely sensitive in one direction, had become callous in every other.

* * * * *

Greatorex was in the kitchen, smoking his Sunday afternoon pipe in the chimney corner, screened from the open doorway by the three-foot thickness of the house wall.

Maggie, his servant, planted firmly on the threshold, jerked her head over her shoulder to call to him.

“There’s a yoong laady wants to see yo, Mr. Greatorex!”

There was no response but a sharp tapping on the hob, as Greatorex knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

Maggie stood looking at Alice a little mournfully with her deep-set, blue, pathetic eyes.  Maggie had once been pretty in spite of her drab hair and flat features, but where her high color remained it had hardened with her thirty-five years.