ger and longer intervals
between. And he had never come ("that way") since last year, when his
second child was born.

Nothing but life or death would bring Rowcliffe out in his car after
nightfall. Yet the thing had her every time. And it was as if her
heart was ground with the grinding and torn with the tearing of the
car.

Then she said to herself, "I must end it somehow. It's horrible to go
on caring like this. He was right. It would be better not to see him
at all."

And she began counting the days and the hours till Wednesday when she
would see him.

LIX

Wednesday was still the Vicar's day for visiting his parish. It was
also Rowcliffe's day for visiting his daughter. But the Vicar was not
going to change it on that account. On Wednesday, if it was a fine
afternoon, she was always sure of having Rowcliffe to herself.

Rowcliffe himself had become the creature of unalterable habit.

She was conscious now of the normal pulse of time, a steady pulse that
beat with a large rhythm, a measure of seven days, from Wednesday to
Wednesday.

She filled the days between with reading and walking and parish work.

There had been changes in Garthdale. Mr. Grierson had got married in
one of his bursts of enthusiasm and had gone away. His place had been
taken by Mr. Macey, the strenuous son of a Durlingham grocer. Mr.
Macey had got into the Church by sheer strenuousness and had married,
strenuously, a sharp and sallow wife. Between them they left very
little parish work for Gwenda.

She had become a furious reader. She liked hard stuff that her brain
could bite on. It fell on a book and gutted it, throwing away the
trash. She read all the modern poets and novelists she cared about,
English and foreign. They left her stimulated but unsatisfied. There
were not enough good ones to keep her going. She worked through the
Elizabethan dramatists and all the Vicar's Tudor Classics, and came
on Jowett's Translations of the Platonic Dialogues by the way, and
was lured on the quest of Ultimate Reality, and found that there
was nothing like Thought to keep you from thinking. She took to
metaphysics as you take to dram-drinking. She must have strong, heavy
stuff that drugged her brain. And when she found that she could trust
her intellect she set it deliberately to fight her passion.

At first it was an even match, for Gwenda's intellect, like her body,
was robust. It generally held its ground from Thursday morning till