Nothing had ever turned out as he had planned or thought or willed. He
had planned to leave the parish. He had thought that in his wisdom he
had saved Alice by shutting her up in Garthdale. He had thought that
she was safe at choir-practice with Jim Greatorex. He had thought
that Mary was devoted to him and that Gwenda was capable of all
disobedience and all iniquity. She had gone away and he had forbidden
her to come back again. He had also forbidden Greatorex to enter his
house.

And Greatorex was entering it every day, for news of him to take to
Alice at Upthorne. Gwenda had come back and would never go again, and
it was she and not Mary who had proved herself devoted. And it was not
his wisdom but Greatorex's scandalous passion for her that had saved
Alice. As for leaving the parish because of the scandal, the Vicar
would never leave it now. He was tied there in his Vicarage by his
stroke.

It left him with a paralysis of the right side and an utter confusion
and enfeeblement of intellect.

In three months he recovered partially from the paralysis. But the
flooding of his brain had submerged or carried away whole tracts
of recent memory, and the last vivid, violent impression--Alice's
affair--was wiped out.

There was no reason why he should not stay on. What was left of his
memory told him that Alice was at the Vicarage, and he was worried
because he never saw her about.

He did not know that the small gray house above the churchyard had
become a place of sinister and scandalous tragedy; that his name and
his youngest daughter's name were bywords in three parishes; and that
Alice had been married in conspicuous haste by the horrified Vicar
of Greffington to a man whom only charitable people regarded as her
seducer.

And the order of time had ceased for him with this breach in the
sequence of events. He had a dim but enduring impression that it
was always prayer time. No hours marked the long stretches of blank
darkness and of confused and crowded twilight. Only, now and then, a
little light pulsed feebly in his brain, a flash that renewed itself
day by day; and day by day, in a fresh experience, he was aware that
he was ill.

It was as if the world stood still and his mind moved. It "wandered,"
as they said. And in its wanderings it came upon strange gaps and
hollows and fantastic dislocations, landslips where a whole foreground
had given way. It looked at these things with a serene and dreamlike
wond