enda dreamed that she saw Mary lying dead and with a dead
child in the crook of her arm.

She woke in anguish and terror.

LVIII

Three years passed and six months. The Cartarets had been in Garthdale
nine years.

Gwenda Cartaret sat in the dining-room at the Vicarage alone with her
father.

It was nearly ten o'clock of the March evening. They waited for the
striking of the clock. It would be prayer time then, and after prayers
the Vicar would drag himself upstairs to bed, and in the peace
that slid into the room when he left it Gwenda would go on with her
reading.

She had her sewing in her lap and her book, Bergson's _Evolution
creatrice_ propped open before her on the table. She sewed as she
read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that
reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and
when she read he talked. Toward ten his silence would be broken by a
continual sighing and yearning. The Vicar longed for prayer time to
come and end his day. But he had decreed that prayer time was ten
o'clock and he would not have permitted it to come a minute sooner.

He nursed a book on his knees, but he made no pretence of reading
it. He had taken off his glasses and sat with his hands folded, in an
attitude of utter resignation to his own will.

In the kitchen Essy Gale sat by the dying fire and waited for the
stroke of ten. And as she waited she stitched at the torn breeches of
her little son.

Essy had come back to the house where she had been turned away. For
her mother was wanted by Mrs. Greatorex at Upthorne and what Mrs.
Greatorex wanted she got. There were two more children now at the Farm
and work enough for three women in the house. And Essy, with all her
pride, had not been too proud to come back. She had no feeling but
pity for the old man, her master, who had bullied her and put her to
shame. If it pleased God to afflict him that was God's affair, and,
even as a devout Wesleyan, Essy considered that God had about done
enough.

As Essy sat and stitched, she smiled, thinking of Greatorex's son who
lay in her bed in the little room over the kitchen. Miss Gwenda let
her have him with her on the nights when Mrs. Gale slept up at the
Farm.

It was quiet in the Vicarage kitchen. The door into the back yard was
shut, the door that Essy used to keep open when she listened for a
footstep and a whisper. That door had betrayed her many a time when
the wind slammed it