“That’s a better reason still.  You don’t want to marry a beastly clever woman.  You really don’t.”

“I’d risk it.  That sort of cleverness doesn’t last long.”

“It would last your time,” she said.

She rose.  It was as much as giving him his dismissal.

He stood a moment watching her.  She and all her movements still seemed to him incredible.

“Do you mind telling me where you’re going to?”

“I’m going to Mummy.”  She explained to his blankness:  “My stepmother.”

He remembered.  Mummy was the lady who was “the very one,” the lady of remarkable resources.

It seemed to him then that he saw it all.  He knew what she was going for.

“I see.  Instead of your sister,” he sneered.

“Papa wouldn’t let Ally go to her.  But he can’t stop me.”

“Oh, no.  Nobody could stop you.”

She smiled softly.  She had missed the brutality of his emphasis.

* * * * *

He said to himself that Gwenda was impossible.  She was obstinate and conceited and wrong-headed.  She was utterly selfish, a cold mass of egoism.

“Cold?” He was not so sure.  She might be.  But she was capable, he suspected, of adventures.  Instead of taking her sister away to have her chance, she was rushing off to secure it herself.  And the irony of the thing was that it was he who had put it into her head.

Well—­she was no worse, and no better—­than the rest of them.  Only unlike them in the queerness of her fascination.  He wondered how long it would have lasted?

You couldn’t go on caring for a woman like that, who had never cared a rap about you.

And yet—­he could have sworn—­Oh, that was nothing.  She had only thought of him because he had been her only chance.

He made himself think these things of her because they gave him unspeakable consolation.

All the way back to Morfe he thought them, while on his right hand Karva rose and receded and rose again, and changed at every turn its aspect and its form.  He thought them to an accompaniment of an interior, persistent voice, the voice of his romantic youth, that said to him, “That is her hill, her hill—­do you remember?  That’s where you met her first.  That’s where you saw her jumping.  That’s her hill—­her hill—­her hill.”

XXXIX

The Vicar had been fidgeting in his study, getting up and sitting down, and looking at the clock every two minutes.  Gwenda had told him that she wanted to speak to him, and he had stipulated that the interview should be after prayer time, for he knew that he was going to be upset.  He never allowed family disturbances, if he could help it, to interfere with the attitude he kept up before his Maker.