Gwendolen was the child who, he declared and believed, had always given him most trouble.  He recalled (perversely) a certain thing that (at thirteen) she had said about this prayer.

“It oughtn’t to be prayed,” she had said.  “You don’t really think you can fool God that way, Papa?  If I had a servant who groveled to me like that I’d tell him he must learn to keep his chin up or go.”

She had said it before Robina who had laughed.  And Mr. Cartaret’s answer to it had been to turn his back on both of them and leave the room.  At least he thought it was his answer.  Gwendolen had thought that in a flash of intellectual honesty he agreed with her, only that he hadn’t quite enough honesty to say so before Mummy.

All this he recalled, and the question she had pursued him with about that time. “What are the sins that do most easily beset us? What are the temptations to which we are especially prone?” And his own evasive answer.  “Ask yourself, my child.”

Another year and she had left off asking him questions.  She drew back into herself and became every day more self-willed, more solitary, more inaccessible.

And now, if he could have seen things as they really were, Mr. Cartaret would have perceived that he was afraid of Gwenda.  As it was, he thought he was only afraid of what Gwenda might do.

Alice was capable of some things; but Gwenda was capable of anything.

* * * * *

Suddenly, to Gwenda’s surprise, her father sighed; a dislocating sigh.  It came between the Benediction and the Lord’s Prayer.

For, even as he invoked the blessing Mr. Cartaret suddenly felt sorry for himself again.  His children were no good to him.

By which he meant that his third wife, Robina, was no good.

But he did not know that he visited his wife’s shortcomings on their heads, any more than he knew that he hated Essy and her sin because he himself was an enforced, reluctant celibate.

XXVII

The next day at dusk, Essy Gale slipped out to her mother’s cottage down by the beck.

Mrs. Gale had just cleared the table after her tea, had washed up the tea-things and was putting them away in the cupboard when Essy entered.  She looked round sharply, inimically.

Essy stood by the doorway, shamefaced.

“Moother,” she said softly, “I want to speaak to yo.”

Mrs. Gale struck an attitude of astonishment and fear, although she had expected Essy to come at such an hour and with such a look, and only wondered that she had not come four months ago.

“Yo’re nat goain’ t’ saay as yo’ve got yoresel into trooble?”

For four months Mrs. Gale had preserved an innocent face before her neighbors and she desired to preserve it to the last possible moment.  And up to the last possible moment, even to her daughter, she was determined to ignore what had happened.