Alice stared with wide eyes of innocence.

“What if I did?  It won’t make any difference in the long run.”

The Vicar, with his hands plunged in his trousers pockets, jerked forward at her from the waist.  It was his gesture when he thrust.

“For all the difference it’ll make to you, my dear child, you might have spared yourself the trouble and expense.”

He paused.

“Has young Rowcliffe been here to-day?”

“No,” said Alice defiantly, “he hasn’t.”

“You expected him?”

“I daresay Mary did.”

“I’m not asking what Mary did.  Did you expect him or did you not?”

“He said he might turn up.”

“He said he might turn up.  You expected him.  And he hasn’t turned up. 
And you can’t think why.  Isn’t that so?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Papa.”

“I mean, my child, that you’re living in a fool’s paradise.”

“I haven’t a notion what you mean by that.”

“Perhaps Gwenda can enlighten you.”

The color died in Ally’s scared face.

“I can’t see,” she said, “what Gwenda’s got to do with it.”

“She’s got something to do with young Rowcliffe’s not turning up, I think.  I met the two of them half way between Upthorne and Bar Hill at half past four.”

He took out his watch.

“And it’s ten past six now.”

He sat down, turning his chair so as not to see her face.  He did not, at the moment, care to look at her.

“You might go and ask Mrs. Gale to send me in a cup of tea.”

Alice went out.

XXXIV

“It’s a quarter past six now,” she said to herself.  “They must come back from Bar Hill by Upthorne.  I shall meet them at Upthorne if I start now.”

She slipped her rough coat over the new gown and started.

Her fear drove her, and she went up the hill at an impossible pace. 
She trembled, staggered, stood still and went on again.

The twilight of the unborn moon was like the horrible twilight of dreams.  She walked as she had walked in nightmares, with knees, weak as water, that sank under her at every step.

She passed the schoolhouse with its beckoning ash-tree.  The schoolhouse stirred the pain under her heart.  She remembered the shining night when she had shown herself there and triumphed.

The pain then was so intolerable that her mind revolted from it as from a thing that simply could not be.  The idea by which she lived asserted itself against the menace of destruction.  It was not so much an idea as an instinct, blind, obstinate, immovable.  It had behind it the wisdom and the persistence of life.  It refused to believe where belief meant death to it.

She said to herself, “He’s lying.  He’s lying.  He’s made it all up.  He never met them.”

* * * * *