sn't it?"

But he had given her her chance. She rose to it.

"I've done it ever since we came here." (It was as if she had said
"Long before _you_ came.") "I do it because I like it. That's the best
of this place. You can do what you like in it. There's nobody to see
you."

("Counting me," he thought, "as nobody.")

"I should like to do it, too," he said--"to go out before sunrise--if
I hadn't got to. If I did it for fun--like you."

He knew he would not really have liked it. But his romantic youth
persuaded him in that moment that he would.

XVII

Mary was up in the attic, the west attic that looked on to the road
through its shy gable window.

She moved quietly there, her whole being suffused exquisitely with a
sense of peace, of profound, indwelling goodness. Every act of hers
for the last three days had been incomparably good, had been, indeed,
perfect. She had waited on Alice hand and foot. She had made the
chicken broth refused by Alice. There was nothing that she would not
do for poor little Ally. When little Ally was petulant and sullen,
Mary was gentle and serene. She felt toward little Ally, lying there
so little and so white, a poignant, yearning tenderness. Today she
had visited all the sick people in the village, though it was not
Wednesday, Dr. Rowcliffe's day. (Only by visiting them on other days
could Mary justify and make blameless her habit of visiting them on
Wednesdays.) She had put the house in order. She had done her shopping
in Morfe to such good purpose that she had concealed even from herself
the fact that she had gone into Morfe, surreptitiously, to fetch the
doctor.

Of course Mary was aware that she had fetched him. She had been driven
to that step by sheer terror. All the way home she kept on saying to
herself, "I've saved Ally." "I've saved Ally." That thought, splendid
and exciting, rushed to the lighted front of Mary's mind; if the
thought of Rowcliffe followed its shining trail, it thrust him back,
it spread its luminous wings to hide him, it substituted its heavenly
form for his.

So effectually did it cover him that Mary herself never dreamed that
he was there.

Neither did the Vicar, when he saw her arrive, laden with parcels,
wholesomely cheerful and reddened by her ride. He had said to her
"You're a good girl, Mary," and the sadness of his tone implied that
he wished her sister Gwendolen and her sister Alice were more like
her. And he had smiled at her under