a furrin place alone with a man. Mrs. Vine
had seen her through the parlour window, and her face was as white as
chalk--not a scrap of paint on it. Mr. Southland had met her on the
Brodnyx Road, and she had bowed to him polite and stately--no shrinking
from an honest man's eye. According to the Woolpack, if you sinned as
Ellen was reported to have sinned, you were either brazen or thoroughly
ashamed of yourself, and Ellen, by being neither, did much to soften
public opinion, and make it incline towards the official explanation of
her absence.

This tendency increased when it became known that Arthur Alce was
leaving Donkey Street. The Woolpack held that if Ellen had been guilty,
Alce would not put himself in the wrong by going away. He would either
have remained as the visible rebuke of her misconduct, or he would have
bundled Ellen herself off to some distant part of the kingdom, such as
the Isle of Wight, where the Goddens had cousins. By leaving the
neighbourhood he gave colour to the mysteriously-started rumour that he
was not so easy to get on with as you'd think ... after all, it's never
a safe thing for a girl to marry her sister's sweetheart ... probably
Alce had been hankering after his old love and Ellen resented it ... the
Woolpack suddenly discovered that Alce was leaving not so much on
Ellen's account as on Joanna's--he'd been unable to get off with the old
love, even when he'd got on with the new, and now that the new was off
too ... well, there was nothing for it but for Arthur Alce to be off. He
was going to his brother, who had a big farm in the shires--a proper
farm, with great fields each of which was nearly as big as a marsh farm,
fifty, seventy, a hundred acres even.

Sec.34

Joanna bitterly resented Arthur's going, but she could not prevent it,
for if he stayed Ellen threatened to go herself.

"I'll get a post as lady's-maid sooner than stay on here with you and
Arthur. Have you absolutely no delicacy, Jo?--Can't you see how awkward
it'll be for me if everywhere I go I run the risk of meeting him?
Besides, you'll be always plaguing me to go back to him, and I tell you
I'll never do that--never."

Arthur, too, did not seem anxious to stay. He saw that if Ellen was at
Ansdore he could not be continually running to and fro on his errands
for Joanna. That tranquil life of service was gone, and he did not care
for the thought of exile at Donkey Street, a shutting of himself into
his parish