as ten times more awful than poor little Ally."

"There are moments, Gwenda, when I think you are."

"Moments? You always did think it. You think it still. And yet
you'll have me here but you won't have her. Just because she's gone a
technical howler and I haven't."

"You haven't. But you'd have gone a worse one if you'd had the
chance."

Gwenda raised her head.

"You know, Molly, that that isn't true."

"I said if. I suppose you think you had your chance, then?"

"I don't think anything. Except that I've got to go."

"You haven't. You're going to stay for dinner now you're here."

"I can't, really, Mary."

But Mary was obstinate. Whether her sister stayed or went she made it
hard for her. She kept it up on the stairs and at the door and at the
garden gate.

"Perhaps you'll come some night when Steven's here. You know he's
always glad to see you."

The sting of it was in Mary's watching eyes. For, when you came to
think of it, there was nothing else she could very well have said.

LXI

That year, when spring warmed into summer, Gwenda's strength went from
her.

She was always tired. She fought with her fatigue and got the better
of it, but in a week or two it returned. Rowcliffe told her to
rest and she rested, for a day or two, lying on the couch in the
dining-room where Ally used to lie, and when she felt better she
crawled out on to the moor and lay there.

One day she said to herself, "There's Ally. I'll go and see how she's
getting on."

She dragged herself up the hill to Upthorne.

It was a day of heat and hidden sunlight. The moor and the marshes
were drenched in the gray June mist. The hillside wore soft vapor like
a cloak hiding its nakedness.

At the top of the Three Fields the nave of the old barn showed as
if lifted up and withdrawn into the distance. But it was no longer
solitary. The thorn-tree beside it had burst into white flower; it
shimmered far-off under the mist in the dim green field, like a magic
thing, half-hidden and about to disappear, remaining only for the hour
of its enchantment.

It gave her the same subtle and mysterious joy that she had had on
the night she and Rowcliffe walked together and saw the thorn-trees on
Greffington Edge white under the hidden moon.

The gray Farm-house was changed, for Jim Greatorex had got on. He
had built himself another granary on the north side of the mistal. He
built it long and low, of hewn stone, with a corrugated iron