house and out into
the mistal and up the Three Fields. She would crouch on a heap of
corn-sacks, wrapped in a fur coat, and watch him at his work in the
stable and the cow-byre. In her need to immortalise this passion she
could not have done better. Her utter dependence on him flattered and
softened the distrustful, violent and headstrong man. Her one chance,
and Ally knew it, was to cling. If she had once shamed him by her
fastidious shrinking she would have lost him; for, as Mrs. Gale had
told her long ago, you could do nothing with Jimmy when he was shamed.
Maggie, for all her coarseness, had contrived to shame him; so had
Essy in her freedom and her pride. Ally's clinging, so far from
irritating or obstructing him, drew out the infinite pity and
tenderness he had for all sick and helpless things. He could no more
have pushed little Ally from him than he could have kicked a mothering
ewe, or stamped on a new dropped lamb. He would call to her if she
failed to come. He would hold out his big hand to her as he would
have held it to a child. Her smallness, her fineness and fragility
enchanted him. The palms of her hands had the smoothness and softness
of silk, and they made a sound like silk as they withdrew themselves
with a lingering, stroking touch from his. He still felt, with a
fearful and admiring wonder, the difference of her flesh from his.

To be sure Jim's tenderness was partly penitential. Only it was Ally
alone who had moved him to a perfect and unbearable contrition. For
the two women whom he had loved and left Greatorex had felt nothing
but a passing pang. For the woman he had made his wife he would go
always with a wound in his soul.

And with Ally, too, the supernatural came to Nature's aid. Her fear
had a profound strain of the uncanny in it, and Jim's bodily presence
was her shelter from her fear. And as it bound them flesh to flesh,
closer and closer, it wedded them in one memory, one consolation and
one soul.

* * * * *

One day she had followed him into the stable, and on the window-sill,
among all the cobwebs where it had been put away and forgotten, she
found the little bottle of chlorodyne.

She took it up, and Jim scolded her gently as if she had been a child.

"Yore lil haands is always maddlin'. Yo' put thot down."

"What is it?"

"It's poison, is thot. There's enoof there t' kill a maan. Yo' put it
down whan I tall yo'."

She put it down obediently i