to.

Essy's heart was quiet as the heart of her sleeping child. She had
forgotten how madly it had leaped to her lover's footsteps, how it
had staggered at the slamming of the door. She had forgotten the tears
that she had shed when Alice's wild music had rocked the house, and
what the Vicar had said to her that night when she spilled the glass
of water in the study.

But she remembered that Gwenda had given her son his first little
Sunday suit; and that, before Jimmy came, when Essy was in bed, crying
with the face-ache, she had knocked at her door and said, "What is it,
Essy? Can I do anything for you?" She could hear her saying it now.

Essy's memory was like that.

She had thought of Gwenda just then because she heard the sound of Dr.
Rowcliffe's motor car tearing up the Dale.

* * * * *

The woman in the other room heard it too. She had heard its horn
hooting on the moor road nearly a mile away.

She raised her hand and listened. It hooted again, once, twice,
placably, at the turning of the road, under Karva. She shivered at the
sound.

It hooted irritably, furiously, as the car tore through the village.
Its lamps swung a shaft of light over the low garden wall.

At the garden gate the car made a shuddering pause.

Gwenda's face and all her body listened. A little unborn, undying hope
quivered in her heart always at that pausing of the car at her gate.

It hardly gave her time for one heart-beat before she heard the
grinding of the gear as the car took the steep hill to Upthorne.

But she was always taken in by it. She had always that insane hope
that the course of things had changed and that Steven had really
stopped at the gate and was coming to her.

* * * * *

It _was_ insanity, for she knew that Rowcliffe would never come to see
her in the evening now. After his outburst, more than five years ago,
there was no use pretending to each other that they were safe. He had
told her plainly that, if she wanted him to hold out, he must never be
long alone with her at any time, and he must give up coming to see her
late at night. It was much too risky.

"When I can come and see you _that_ way," he had said, "it'll mean
that I've left off caring. But I'll look in every Wednesday if I can.
Every Wednesday as long as I live."

He _had_ come now and then, not on a Wednesday, but "that way." He had
not been able to help it. But he had left lon