. 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