Mary and Gwenda heard it in the dining-room, and set their mouths and braced themselves to bear it.  The Vicar in his study behind the dining-room heard it and scowled.  Essy, the maid-servant, heard it, she heard it worse than anybody, in her kitchen on the other side of the wall.  Now and then, when the Polonaise screamed louder, Mary drew a hissing breath of pain through her locked teeth, and Gwenda grinned.  Not that to Gwenda there was anything funny in the writhing and screaming of the Grande Polonaise.  It was that she alone appreciated its vindictive quality; she admired the completeness, the audacity of Alice’s revenge.

But Essy in her kitchen made no effort to stand up to the Grande Polonaise.  When it began she sat down and laid her arms on the kitchen table, and her head, muffled in her apron, on her arms, and cried.  She couldn’t have told you what the Polonaise was like or what it did to her; all that she could have said was that it went through and through her.  She didn’t know, Essy didn’t, what had come over her; for whatever noise Miss Alice made, she hadn’t taken any notice, not at first.  It was in the last three weeks that the Polonaise had found her out and had begun to go through and through her, till it was more than she could bear.  But Essy, crying into her apron, wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop Miss Alice.

“Poor laass,” Essy said to herself, “she looves to plaay.  And Vicar, he’ll not hold out mooch longer.  He’ll put foot down fore she gets trow.”

Through the screaming of the Polonaise Essy listened for the opening of the study door.

VIII

The study door did not open all at once.

“Wisdom and patience, wisdom and patience——­” The Vicar kept on muttering as he scowled.  Those were his watchwords in his dealings with his womenkind.

The Vicar was making a prodigious effort to maintain what seemed to him his god-like serenity.  He was unaware that he was trying to control at one and the same time his temper and his temperament.

He was a man of middle height and squarish build, dark, pale-skinned and blue-eyed like his daughter Gwendolen.  The Vicar’s body stretched tight the seams of his black coat and kept up, at fifty-seven, a false show of muscular energy.  The Vicar’s face had a subtle quality of deception.  The austere nose, the lean cheek-bones, the square-cut moustache and close-clipped, pointed beard (black, slightly grizzled) made it appear, at a little distance, the face of an ascetic.  It approached, and the blue of the eyes, and the black of their dilated pupils, the stare of the nostrils and the half hidden lines of the red mouth revealed its profound and secret sensuality.