icar's calamity no longer
sheltered him. It took its place in the order of accepted and
irremediable events.

* * * * *

Only the village preserved its sympathy alive. The village, that
obscure congregated soul, long-suffering to calamity, welded together
by saner instincts and profound in memory, the soul that inhabited
the small huddled, humble houses, divided from the Vicarage by no more
than the graveyard of its dead, the village remembered and it knew.

It remembered how the Vicar had come and gone over its thresholds,
how no rain nor snow nor storm had stayed him in his obstinate and
punctual visiting. And whereas it had once looked grimly on its Vicar,
it looked kindly on him now. It endured him for his daughter Gwenda's
sake, in spite of what it knew.

For it knew why the Vicar's third wife had left him. It knew why Alice
Cartaret had gone wrong with Greatorex. It knew what Gwenda Cartaret
had gone for when she went away. It knew why and how Dr. Rowcliffe had
married Mary Cartaret. And it knew why, night after night, he was to
be seen coming and going on the Garthdale road.

* * * * *

The village knew more about Rowcliffe and Gwenda Cartaret than
Rowcliffe's wife knew.

For Rowcliffe's wife's mind was closed to this knowledge by a certain
sensual assurance. When all was said and done, it was she and not
Gwenda who was Rowcliffe's wife. And she had other grounds for
complacency. Her sister, a solitary Miss Cartaret, stowed away in
Garth Vicarage, was of no account. She didn't matter. And as Mary
Cartaret Mary would have mattered even less. But Steven Rowcliffe's
professional reputation served him well. He counted. People who had
begun by trusting him had ended by liking him, and in two years' time
his social value had become apparent. And as Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe
Mary had a social value too.

But while Steven, who had always had it, took it for granted and never
thought about it, Mary could think of nothing else. Her social value,
obscured by the terrible two years in Garthdale, had come to her as a
discovery and an acquisition. For all her complacency, she could not
regard it as a secure thing. She was sensitive to every breath that
threatened it; she was unable to forget that, if she was Steven
Rowcliffe's wife, she was Alice Greatorex's sister.

Even as Mary Cartaret she had been sensitive to Alice. But in those
days of obscurity and is