And Ally looked at her again.

“It’s not my feelings—­” she said.

Mary reddened.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’ll know, some day,” Ally said and turned her back on her.

* * * * *

Mary went out, closing the door softly, as if she spared her sick sister’s unreasonably irritated nerves.  She felt rather miserable as she undressed alone in her bedroom.  She was wounded in her sweetness and her goodness, and she was also a little afraid of what Ally might take it into her head to say or do.  She didn’t try to think what Ally had meant.  Her sweetness and goodness, with their instinct of self-preservation, told her that it might be better not.

The August night was warm and tender, and, when Mary had got into bed and lay stretched out in contentment under the white sheet, she began to think of Rowcliffe to the exclusion of all other interests; and presently, between a dream and a dream, she fell asleep.

* * * * *

But Ally could not sleep.

She lay till dawn thinking and thinking, and turning from side to side between her thoughts.  They were not concerned with Gwenda or with Rowcliffe.  After her little spurt of indignation she had ceased to think about Gwenda or Rowcliffe either.  Mary’s news had made her think about herself, and her thoughts were miserable.  Ally was so far like her father the Vicar, that the idea of Mary’s marrying was intolerable to her and for precisely the same reason, because she saw no prospect of marrying herself.  Her father had begun by forbidding Mary’s engagement but he would end by sanctioning it.  He would never sanction her marriage to Jim Greatorex.

Even if she defied her father and married Jim Greatorex in spite of him there would be almost as much shame in it as if, like Essy, she had never married him at all.

And she couldn’t live without him.

Ally had suffered profoundly from the shock that had struck her down under the arcades on the road to Upthorne.  It had left her more than ever helpless, more than ever subject to infatuation, more than ever morally inert.  Ally’s social self had grown rigid in the traditions of her class, and she was still aware of the unsuitability of her intimacy with Jim Greatorex; but disaster had numbed her once poignant sense of it.  She had yielded to his fascination partly through weakness, partly in defiance, partly in the sheer, healthy self-assertion of her suffering will and her frustrated senses.  But she had not will enough to defy her father.  She credited him with an infinite capacity to crush and wound.  And for a day and a half the sight of Mary’s happiness—­a spectacle which Mary did not spare her—–­had made Ally restless.  Under the incessant sting of it her longing for Greatorex became insupportable.

On Sunday the Vicar was still too deeply afflicted by the same circumstance to notice Ally’s movements, and Ally took advantage of his apathy to excuse herself from Sunday school that afternoon.  And about three o’clock she was at Upthorne Farm.  She and Greatorex had found a moment after morning service to arrange the hour.