She had passed the turn of the hill.  She had come to the high towers, sinister and indistinct, to the hollow walls and haunted arcades of the dead mining station.  Upthorne was hidden by the shoulder of the hill.

She stopped suddenly, there where the road skirted the arcades.  She was struck by a shock of premonition, an instinct older and profounder than that wisdom of the blood.  She had the sense that what was happening now, her coming, like this, to the towers and the arcades, had happened before, and was so related to what was about to happen that she knew this also and with the same shock of recognition.

It would happen when she had come to the last arch of the colonnade.

It was happening now.  She had come to the last arch.

* * * * *

That instant she was aware of Rowcliffe and Gwenda coming toward her down the hill.

Their figures were almost indiscernible in the twilight.  It was by their voices that she knew them.

Before they could see her she had slipped out of their path behind the shelter of the arch.

She knew them by their voices.  Yet their voices had something in them that she did not know, something that told her that they had been with each other many times before; that they understood each other; that they were happy in each other and absorbed.

The pain was no longer inside her heart but under it.  It was dull rather than sharp, yet it moved there like a sharp sickle, a sickle that gathered and ground the live flesh it turned in and twisted.  A sensation of deadly sickness made her draw farther yet into the corner of the arcade, feeling her way in the darkness with her hand on the wall.  She stumbled on a block of stone, sank on it and cowered there, sobbing and shivering.

Down in Garth village the church clock struck the half hour and the quarter and the hour.

At the half hour Blenkiron, the blacksmith, put Rowcliffe’s horse into the trap.  The sound of the clanking hoofs came up the hill.  Rowcliffe heard them first.

“There’s something wrong down there,” he said.  “They’re coming for me.”

In his heart he cursed them.  For it was there, at the turn of the road, below the arches, that he had meant to say what he had not said the other night.  There was no moon.  The moment was propitious.  And there (just like his cursed luck) was Blenkiron with the trap.

They met above the schoolhouse as the clock struck the quarter.

“You’re wanted, sir,” said the blacksmith, “at Mrs. Gale’s.”

“Is it Essy?”

“Ay, it’s Assy.”

* * * * *

In the cottage down by the beck Essy groaned and cried in her agony.

And on the road to Upthorne, under the arches by the sinister towers,
Alice Cartaret, crouching on her stone, sobbed and shivered.

Not long after seven Essy’s child was born.