fied them. Alice had
her husband and her child. Mary had--all she wanted. Gwenda had nobody
but him.

* * * * *

She had never had anybody but him. For in the beginning the Vicar and
his daughters had failed to make friends among their own sort. Up in
the Dale there had been few to make, and those few Mr. Cartaret had
contrived to alienate one after another by his deplorable legend and
by the austere unpleasantness of his personality. People had not been
prepared for intimacy with a Vicar separated so outrageously from his
third wife. Nobody knew whether it was he or his third wife who had
been outrageous, but the Vicar's manner was not such as to procure for
him the benefit of any doubt. The fact remained that the poor man
was handicapped by an outrageous daughter, and Alice's behavior was
obviously as much the Vicar's fault as his misfortune. And it had been
felt that Gwenda had not done anything to redeem her father's and her
sister's eccentricities, and that Mary, though she was a nice girl,
had hardly done enough. For the last eighteen months visits at the
Vicarage had been perfunctory and very brief, month by month they had
diminished, and before Mary's marriage they had almost ceased.

Still, Mary's marriage had appeased the parish. Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe
had atoned for the third Mrs. Cartaret's suspicious absence and for
Gwenda Cartaret's flight. Lady Frances Gilbey's large wing had further
protected Gwenda.

Then, suddenly, the tale of Alice Cartaret and Greatorex went round,
and it was as if the Vicarage had opened and given up its secret.

At first, the sheer extremity of his disaster had sheltered the Vicar
from his own scandal. Through all Garthdale and Rathdale, in the
Manors and the Lodges and the Granges, in the farmhouses and the
cottages, in the inns and little shops, there was a stir of pity and
compassion. The people who had left off calling at the Vicarage called
again with sympathy and kind inquiries. They were inclined to forget
how impossible the Cartarets had been. They were sorry for Gwenda. But
they had been checked in their advances by Gwenda's palpable recoil.
She had no time to give to callers. Her father had taken all her time.
The callers considered themselves absolved from calling.

Slowly, month by month, the Vicarage was drawn back into its
silence and its loneliness. It assumed, more and more, its aspect of
half-sinister, half-sordid tragedy. The V