She moved quietly there, her whole being suffused exquisitely with a sense of peace, of profound, indwelling goodness.  Every act of hers for the last three days had been incomparably good, had been, indeed, perfect.  She had waited on Alice hand and foot.  She had made the chicken broth refused by Alice.  There was nothing that she would not do for poor little Ally.  When little Ally was petulant and sullen, Mary was gentle and serene.  She felt toward little Ally, lying there so little and so white, a poignant, yearning tenderness.  Today she had visited all the sick people in the village, though it was not Wednesday, Dr. Rowcliffe’s day. (Only by visiting them on other days could Mary justify and make blameless her habit of visiting them on Wednesdays.) She had put the house in order.  She had done her shopping in Morfe to such good purpose that she had concealed even from herself the fact that she had gone into Morfe, surreptitiously, to fetch the doctor.

Of course Mary was aware that she had fetched him.  She had been driven to that step by sheer terror.  All the way home she kept on saying to herself, “I’ve saved Ally.”  “I’ve saved Ally.”  That thought, splendid and exciting, rushed to the lighted front of Mary’s mind; if the thought of Rowcliffe followed its shining trail, it thrust him back, it spread its luminous wings to hide him, it substituted its heavenly form for his.

So effectually did it cover him that Mary herself never dreamed that he was there.

Neither did the Vicar, when he saw her arrive, laden with parcels, wholesomely cheerful and reddened by her ride.  He had said to her “You’re a good girl, Mary,” and the sadness of his tone implied that he wished her sister Gwendolen and her sister Alice were more like her.  And he had smiled at her under his austere moustache, and carried in the biggest parcels for her.

The Vicar was pleased with his daughter Mary.  Mary had never given him an hour’s anxiety.  Mary had never put him in the wrong, never made him feel uncomfortable.  He honestly believed that he was fond of her.  She was like her poor mother.  Goodness, he said to himself, was in her face.

There had been goodness in Mary’s face when she went into Alice’s room to see what she could do for her.  There was goodness in it now, up in the attic, where there was nobody but God to see it; goodness at peace with itself, and utterly content.

She had been back more than an hour.  And ever since teatime she had been up in the attic, putting away her summer gowns.  She shook them and held them out and looked at them, the poor pretty things that she had hardly ever worn.  They hung all limp, all abashed and broken in her hands, as if aware of their futility.  She said to herself, “They were no good, no good at all.  And next year they’ll all be old-fashioned.  I shall be ashamed to be seen in them.”  And she folded them and laid them by for their winter’s rest in the black