* * * * *

Just before ten the three sisters sat waiting, as they had always waited, bored and motionless, for the imminent catastrophe of Prayers.

“I wonder how Essy’s getting on,” said Gwenda.

“Poor little Essy!” Mary said.

“She’s as pleased as Punch,” said Gwenda.  “It’s a boy.  Ally—­did you know that Essy’s had a baby?”

“I don’t care if she has,” said Ally violently.  “It’s got nothing to do with me.  I wish you wouldn’t talk about her beastly baby.”

As the Vicar came out of his study into the dining-room, he fixed his eyes upon his youngest daughter.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said.

“Nothing’s the matter,” said Alice defiantly.  “Why?”

“You look,” he said, “as if somebody was murdering you.”

XXXV

Ally was ill; so ill this time that even the Vicar softened to her.  He led her upstairs himself and made her go to bed and stay there.  He would have sent for Rowcliffe but that Ally refused to see him.

Her mortal apathy passed for submission.  She took her milk from her father’s hand without a murmur.  “There’s a good girl,” he said, as she drank it down.

But it didn’t do her any good.  Nothing did.  The illness itself was no good to her, considering that she didn’t want to be ill this time.  She wanted to die.  And of course she couldn’t die.  It would have been too much happiness and they wouldn’t let her have it.

At first she resented what she called their interference.  She declared, as she had declared before, that there was nothing the matter with her.  She was only tired.  Couldn’t they see that she was tired?  That they tired her?

“Why can’t you leave me alone?  If only you’d go away,” she moaned, “—­all of you—­and leave me alone.”

But very soon she was too tired even to be irritable.  She lay quiet, sunk in the hollow of her bed, and kept her eyes shut, so that she never knew, she said, whether they were there or not.  And it didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered so long as she could just lie there.

It was only when they talked of sending for Rowcliffe that they roused her.  Then she sat up and became, first vehement, then violent.

“You shan’t send for him,” she cried.  “I won’t see him.  If he comes into the house I’ll crawl out of it.”

* * * * *

One day (it was the last Wednesday in April) Gwenda came to her and told her that Rowcliffe was there and had asked to see her.

Ally’s pale eyes lightened and grew large.  They were transparent as glass in her white face.

“Did you send for him?”

“No.”

“Who did then?”

“Papa.”

She closed her eyes.  The old sense of ecstasy came over her, of triumph too, of solemn triumph, as if she, whom they thought so insignificant, had vindicated her tragic dignity at last.