aches it from an impossible point of view--as
if it was sin or crime or something. He talks about her controlling
herself, as if she could help it. Why, she's no more responsible for
being like that than I am for the shape of my nose. I'm afraid I told
him that if anybody was responsible _he_ was, for bringing her to the
worst place imaginable."

"He did that on purpose."

"I know. And I told him he might as well have put her in a lunatic
asylum at once."

He meditated.

"It's not as if he hadn't anybody but himself to think of."

"That's no good. He never does think of anybody but himself. And yet
he'd be awfully sorry, you know, if Ally died."

They sat silent, not looking at each other, until Gwenda spoke again.

"Dr. Rowcliffe--"

He smiled as if it amused him to be addressed so formally.

"Do you _really_ mean it, or are you frightening us? Will Ally really
die--or go mad--if she isn't--happy?"

He was grave again.

"I really mean it. It's a rather serious case. But it's only 'if.' As
I told you, there are scores of women--"

But she waived them all away.

"I only wanted to know."

Her voice stopped suddenly, and he thought that she was going to break
down.

"You mustn't take it so hard," he said. "It's not as if it wasn't
absolutely curable. You must take her away."

Suddenly he remembered that he didn't particularly want Gwenda to go
away. He couldn't, in fact, bear the thought of it.

"Better still," he said, "send her away. Is there anybody you could
send her to?"

"Only Mummy--my stepmother." She smiled through her tears. "Papa would
never let Ally go to _her_."

"Why not?"

"Because she ran away from him."

He tried not to laugh.

"She's really quite decent, though you mightn't think it." Rowcliffe
smiled. "And she's fond of Ally. She's fond of all of us--except Papa.
And," she added, "she knows a lot of people."

He smiled again. He pictured the third Mrs. Cartaret as a woman of
affectionate gaiety and a pleasing worldliness, so well surrounded by
adorers of his own sex that she could probably furnish forth her three
stepdaughters from the numbers of those she had no use for. He was
more than ever disgusted with the Vicar who had driven from him a
woman so admirably fitted to play a mother's part.

"She sounds," he said, "as if she'd be the very one."

"She would be. It's an awful pity."

"Well," he said, "we won't talk any more about it now. We'll think of
something. We