anket and with his head on a hay sack,
lay in the straw of the stable, beside Daisy his mare. From time to
time, as his mood took him, he turned and laid his hand on her in a
poignant caress. As if she had been his first-born, or his bride, he
spoke to her in the thick, soft voice of passion, with pitiful, broken
words and mutterings.

"What is it, Daasy----what is it? There, did they, then, did they? My
beauty--my lil laass. I--I wuss a domned brute to forget tha, a domned
brute."

All that night and the next night he lay beside her. The funeral
passed like a fantastic interlude between the long acts of his
passion. His great sorrow made him humble to Mrs. Gale so that he
allowed her to sustain him with food and drink. And on the third day
it was known throughout Garthdale that young Greatorex, who had lost
his father, had saved his mare.

Only Steven Rowcliffe knew that the mare had saved young Greatorex.

* * * * *

And the little phial of chlorodyne was put back among the cobwebs and
forgotten.

XIV

Down at the Vicarage the Vicar was wrangling with his youngest
daughter. For the third time Alice declared that she was not well and
that she didn't want her milk.

"Whether you want it or not you've got to drink it," said the Vicar.

Alice took the glass in her lap and looked at it.

"Am I to stand over you till you drink it?"

Alice put the rim of the glass to her mouth and shuddered.

"I can't," she said. "It'll make me sick."

"Leave the poor child alone, Papa," said Gwenda.

But the Vicar ignored Gwenda.

"You'll drink it, if I stand here all night," he said.

Alice struggled with a spasm in her throat. He held the glass for her
while she groped piteously.

"Oh, where's my hanky?"

With superhuman clemency he produced his own.

"It'll serve you right if I'm ill," said Alice.

"Come," said the Vicar in his wisdom and his patience. "Come."

He proffered the disgusting cup again.

"I'd drink it and have done with it, if I were you," said Mary in her
soft voice.

Mary's soft voice was too much for Alice.

"Why c-can't you leave me alone? You--you--beast, Mary," she sobbed.

And Mr. Cartaret began again, "Am I to stand here----"

Alice got up, she broke loose from them and left the room.

"You might have known she wasn't going to drink it," Gwenda said.

But the Vicar never knew when he was beaten.

"She would have drunk it," he said, "if Mary