ht him on the threshold of the surgery.

"Will you speak to Miss Cartaret a minute, Dr. Rawcliffe?"

"Certainly."

Mrs. Blenkiron withdrew. The kitchen door closed on her flight. For
the first time in their acquaintance Rowcliffe was alone with Alice
Cartaret, and though he was interested he didn't like it.

"I thought I heard your voice," said he with reckless geniality.

They stood on their thresholds looking at each other across the narrow
passage. It was as if Alice Cartaret's feet were fixed there by an
invisible force that held her fascinated and yet frightened.

Rowcliffe had paused too, as at a post of vantage, the better to
observe her.

A moment ago, warming his hands in the surgery, he could have sworn
that she, the little maneuvering minx, had laid a trap for him. She
had come on her fool's errand, knowing that it was a fool's errand,
for nothing on earth but that she might catch him, alone and
defenseless, in the surgery. It was the sort of thing she did, the
sort of thing she always would do. She didn't want to know (not she!)
whether Jim Greatorex would sing or not, she wanted to know, and
she meant to know, why he, Steven Rowcliffe, hadn't turned up that
afternoon, and where he had gone, and what he had been doing, and the
rest of it. There were windows at the back of the Vicarage. Possibly
she had seen him charging up the hill in pursuit of her sister, and
she was desperate. All this he had believed and did still believe.

But, as he looked across at the little hesitating figure and the
scared face framed in the doorway, he had compassion on her. Poor
little trapper, so pitifully trapped; so ignorant of the first rules
and principles of trapping that she had run hot-foot after her prey
when she should have lain low and lured it silently into her snare.
She was no more than a poor little frightened minx, caught in his
trap, peering at him from it in terror. God knew he hadn't meant to
set it for her, and God only knew how he was going to get her out of
it.

"Poor things," he thought, "if they only knew how horribly they
embarrass me!"

For of course she wasn't the first. The situation had repeated itself,
monotonously, scores of times in his experience. It would have been
a nuisance even if Alice Cartaret had not been Gwendolen Cartaret's
sister. That made it intolerable.

All this complex pity and repugnance was latent in his one sense of
horrible embarrassment.

Then their hands met.