“Who told you I was going?”

“Nobody.  I knew it.”  She answered Gwenda’s eyes.  “I don’t know how I knew it, but I did.  And I know why you’re going and it’s all rot.  You’re going because you know that if you stay Steven Rowcliffe’ll marry you, and you think that if you go he’ll marry me.”

“Whatever put that idea into your head?”

“Nothing put it.  It came.  It shows how awful you must think me if you think I’d go and do a beastly thing like that.”

“Like what?”

“Why—­sneaking him away from you behind your back when I know you like him.  You needn’t lie about it.  You do like him.

“I may be awful,” she went on.  “In fact I know I’m awful.  But I’m decent.  I couldn’t do a caddish thing like that—­I couldn’t really.  And, if I couldn’t, there’s no need for you to go.”

She was sitting on the trunk where Mary had sat, and when she began to speak she had looked down at her small hands that grasped the edge of the lid, their fingers picking nervously at the ragged flap.  They ceased and she looked up.

And in her look, a look that for the moment was divinely lucid, Gwenda saw Ally’s secret and hidden kinship with herself.  She saw it as if through some medium, once troubled and now made suddenly transparent.  It was because of that queer kinship that Ally had divined her.  However awful she was, however tragically foredoomed and driven, Ally was decent.  She knew what Gwenda was doing because it was what, if any sustained lucidity were ever given her, she might have done herself.

But in Ally no idea but the one idea was very deeply rooted.  Sustained lucidity never had been hers.  It would be easy to delude her.

“I’m going,” Gwenda said, “because I want to.  If I stayed I wouldn’t marry Steven Rowcliffe, and Steven Rowcliffe wouldn’t marry me.”

“But—­I thought—­I thought——­”

“What did you think?”

“That there was something between you.  Papa said so.”

“If Papa said so you might have known there was nothing in it.”

“And isn’t there?”

“Of course there isn’t.  You can put that idea out of your head forever.”

“All the same I believe that’s why you’re going.”

“I’m going because I can’t stand this place any longer.  You said I’d be sick of it in three months.”

“You’re not sick of it.  You love it.  It’s me you can’t stand.”

“No, Ally—­no.”

She plunged for another argument and found it.

“What I can’t stand is living with Papa.”

Ally agreed that this was rather more than plausible.

XXXVIII

The next person to be told was Rowcliffe.

It was known in the village through the telegrams that Gwenda was going away.  The postmistress told Mrs. Gale, who told Mrs. Blenkiron.  These two persons and four or five others had known ever since Sunday that the Vicar’s daughter was going away; and the Vicar did not know it yet.