er and passed on.

And in the background, on some half-lit, isolated tract of memory,
raised above ruin, and infinitely remote, he saw the figure of his
youngest daughter. It was a girlish, innocent figure, and though,
because of the whiteness of its face, he confused it now and then with
the figure of Alice's dead mother, his first wife, he was aware that
it was really Alice.

This figure of Alice moved him with a vague and tender yearning.

What puzzled and worried him was that in his flashes of luminous
experience he didn't see her there. And it was then that the Vicar
would make himself wonderful and piteous by asking, a dozen times a
day, "Where's Ally?"

For by the stroke that made him wonderful and piteous the Vicar's
character and his temperament were changed. Nothing was left of Ally's
tyrant and Robina's victim, the middle-aged celibate, filled with the
fury of frustration and profoundly sorry for himself. His place was
taken by a gentle old man, an old man of an appealing and childlike
innocence, pure from all lust, from all self-pity, enjoying, actually
enjoying, the consideration that his stroke had brought him.

He was changed no less remarkably in his affections. He was utterly
indifferent to Mary, whom he had been fond of. He yearned for Alice,
whom he had hated. And he clung incessantly to Gwenda, whom he had
feared.

When he looked round in his strange and awful gentleness and said,
"Where's Ally?" his voice was the voice of a mother calling for her
child. And when he said, "Where's Gwenda?" it was the voice of a child
calling for its mother.

And as he continually thought that Alice was at the Vicarage when she
was at Upthorne, so he was convinced that Gwenda had left him when she
was there.

* * * * *

Rowcliffe judged that this confusion of the Vicar's would be favorable
to his experiment.

And it was.

When Mr. Cartaret saw his youngest daughter for the first time since
their violent rupture he gazed at her tranquilly and said, "And where
have _you_ been all this time?"

"Not very far, Papa."

He smiled sweetly.

"I thought you'd run away from your poor old father. Let me see--was
it Ally? My memory's going. No. It was Gwenda who ran away. Wasn't it
Gwenda?"

"Yes, Papa."

"Well--she must come back again. I can't do without Gwenda."

"She has come back, Papa."

"She's always coming hack. But she'll go away again. Where is she?"

"I'm here,