e
little body carried an enormous engine, an engine of infernal and
terrifying power. When she lay down and when she got up and with every
sudden movement its throbbing shook her savagely.

Night and morning she called to her sister: "Oh Gwenda, come and feel
my heart. I do believe it's growing. It's getting too big for my body.
It frightens me when it jumps about like that."

It frightened Gwenda.

But it did not really frighten Alice. She rejoiced in it, rather,
and exulted. After all, it was a good thing that she had not
got pneumonia, which might have killed her as it had killed John
Greatorex. She had got what served her purpose better. It served all
her purposes. If she had tried she could not have hit on anything that
would have annoyed her father more or put him more conspicuously in
the wrong. To begin with, it was his doing. He had worried her into
it. And he had brought her to a place which was the worst place
conceivable for anybody with a diseased heart, since you couldn't stir
out of doors without going up hill.

Night and morning Alice stood before the looking-glass and turned out
the lining of her lips and eyelids and saw with pleasure the pale rose
growing paler. Every other hour she laid her hand on her heart and
took again the full thrill of its dangerous throbbing, or felt her
pulse to assure herself of the halt, the jerk, the hurrying of the
beat. Night and morning and every other hour she thought of Rowcliffe.

"If it goes on like this, they'll _have_ to send for him," she said.

But it had gone on, the three weeks had passed, and yet they had not
sent. The Vicar had put his foot down. He wouldn't have the doctor. He
knew better than a dozen doctors what was the matter with his daughter
Alice.

Alice said nothing. She simply waited. As if some profound and
dead-sure instinct had sustained her, she waited, sickening.

And on the last night of the third week she fainted. She had dragged
herself upstairs to bed, staggered across the little landing and
fallen on the threshold of her room.

They kept her in bed next day. At one o'clock she refused her
chicken-broth. She would neither eat nor drink. And a little before
three Gwenda went for the doctor.

She had not told Alice she was going. She had not told anybody.

XV

She had to walk, for Mary had taken her bicycle. Nobody knew where
Mary had gone or when she had started or when she would be back.

But the four miles between G