ath, a fear that she could own and face, and set it up
in place of that secret and dangerous thing which was the fear of life
itself.

Ally, insisting a dozen times a day that she had killed poor Papa,
was completely taken in by this play of her surreptitiously
self-preserving soul. Even Rowcliffe was taken in by it. He called
it a morbid obsession. And he began to wonder whether he had not been
mistaken about Ally after all, whether her nature was not more subtle
and sensitive than he had guessed, more intricately and dangerously
mixed.

For the sadness of the desolate land, of the naked hillsides, of the
moor marshes with their ghostly mists; the brooding of the watchful,
solitary house, the horror of haunted twilights, of nightfall and of
midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his
cattle and she lay alone under the white ceiling that sagged above her
bed and heard the weak wind picking at the pane; her fear of Maggie
and of what Maggie had been to Greatorex and might be again; her fear
of the savage, violent and repulsive elements in the man who was
her god; her fear of her own repulsion; the tremor of her recoiling
nerves; premonitions of her alien blood, the vague melancholy of her
secret motherhood; they were all mingled together and hidden from her
in the vast gloom of her one fear.

And once the dominant terror was set up, her instinct found a thousand
ways of strengthening it. Through her adoration of her lover her mind
had become saturated with his mournful consciousness of sin. In their
moments of contrition they were both convinced that they would be
punished. But Ally had borne her sin superbly; she had declared that
it was hers and hers only, and that she and not Greatorex would be
punished. And now the punishment had come. She persuaded herself that
her father's death was the retribution Heaven required.

* * * * *

And all the time, through the perilous months, Nature, mindful of her
own, tightened her hold on Ally through Ally's fear. Ally was afraid
to be left alone with it. Therefore she never let Greatorex out of her
sight if she could help it. She followed him from room to room of the
sad house where he was painting and papering and whitewashing to make
it fine for her. Where he was she had to be. Stowed away in some swept
corner, she would sit with her sweet and sorrowful eyes fixed on him
as he labored. She trotted after him through the