' womenfawlk yo'll
'aave t' racken."

He knew it.

The first he had to reckon with was Maggie.

Maggie, being given notice, had refused to take it.

"Yo' can please yoresel, Mr. Greatorex. I can goa. I can goa. But ef I
goa yo'll nat find anoother woman as'll coom to yo'. There's nat woon
as'll keer mooch t' work for _yore_ laady."

"Wull yo' wark for 'er, Maaggie?" he had said.

And Maggie, with a sullen look and hitching her coarse apron, had
replied remarkably:

"Ef Assy Gaale can wash fer er I rackon _I_ can shift to baake an'
clane."

"Wull yo' waait on 'er?" he had persisted.

Maggie had turned away her face from him.

"Ay, I'll waait on 'er," she said.

And Maggie had stayed to bake and clean. Rough and sullen, without a
smile, she had waited on young Mrs. Greatorex.

* * * * *

But Alice was not afraid of Maggie. She was not going to admit for a
moment that she was afraid of her. She was not going to admit that she
was afraid of anything but one thing--that her father would die.

If he died she would have killed him.

Or, rather, she and Greatorex would have killed him between them.

This statement Ally held to and reiterated and refused to qualify.

For Alice at Upthorne had become a creature matchless in cunning and
of subtle and marvelous resource. She had been terrified and tortured,
shamed and cowed. She had been hounded to her marriage and conveyed
with an appalling suddenness to Upthorne, that place of sinister and
terrible suggestion, and the bed in which John Greatorex had died had
been her marriage bed. Her mind, like a thing pursued and in deadly
peril, took instantaneously a line. It doubled and dodged; it hid
itself; its instinct was expert in disguises, in subterfuges and
shifts.

In her soul she knew that she was done for if she once admitted and
gave in to her fear of Upthorne and of her husband's house, or if
she were ever to feel again her fear of Greatorex, which was the most
intolerable of all her fears. It was as if Nature itself were aware
that, if Ally were not dispossessed of that terror before Greatorex's
child was born her own purpose would be insecure; as if the unborn
child, the flesh and blood of the Greatorexes that had entered into
her, protested against her disastrous cowardice.

So, without Ally being in the least aware of it, Ally's mind,
struggling toward sanity, fabricated one enormous fear, the fear of
her father's de