“Naw,” said Jim Greatorex’s kinswoman, “if you want Greatorex to sing for you as bad as all that, Miss Cartaret, you’d better speak to the doctor.”

Rowcliffe became suddenly grave.  He watched the door.

“He’d mebbe do it for him.  He sats soom store by Dr. Rawcliffe.”

“But”—­Ally’s voice sounded nearer—­“he’s gone, hasn’t he?”

(The minx, the little, little minx!)

“Naw.  But he’s joost goin’.  Shall I catch him?”

“You might.”

Mrs. Blenkiron caught him on the threshold of the surgery.

“Will you speak to Miss Cartaret a minute, Dr. Rawcliffe?”

“Certainly.”

Mrs. Blenkiron withdrew.  The kitchen door closed on her flight.  For the first time in their acquaintance Rowcliffe was alone with Alice Cartaret, and though he was interested he didn’t like it.

“I thought I heard your voice,” said he with reckless geniality.

They stood on their thresholds looking at each other across the narrow passage.  It was as if Alice Cartaret’s feet were fixed there by an invisible force that held her fascinated and yet frightened.

Rowcliffe had paused too, as at a post of vantage, the better to observe her.

A moment ago, warming his hands in the surgery, he could have sworn that she, the little maneuvering minx, had laid a trap for him.  She had come on her fool’s errand, knowing that it was a fool’s errand, for nothing on earth but that she might catch him, alone and defenseless, in the surgery.  It was the sort of thing she did, the sort of thing she always would do.  She didn’t want to know (not she!) whether Jim Greatorex would sing or not, she wanted to know, and she meant to know, why he, Steven Rowcliffe, hadn’t turned up that afternoon, and where he had gone, and what he had been doing, and the rest of it.  There were windows at the back of the Vicarage.  Possibly she had seen him charging up the hill in pursuit of her sister, and she was desperate.  All this he had believed and did still believe.

But, as he looked across at the little hesitating figure and the scared face framed in the doorway, he had compassion on her.  Poor little trapper, so pitifully trapped; so ignorant of the first rules and principles of trapping that she had run hot-foot after her prey when she should have lain low and lured it silently into her snare.  She was no more than a poor little frightened minx, caught in his trap, peering at him from it in terror.  God knew he hadn’t meant to set it for her, and God only knew how he was going to get her out of it.

“Poor things,” he thought, “if they only knew how horribly they embarrass me!”

For of course she wasn’t the first.  The situation had repeated itself, monotonously, scores of times in his experience.  It would have been a nuisance even if Alice Cartaret had not been Gwendolen Cartaret’s sister.  That made it intolerable.

All this complex pity and repugnance was latent in his one sense of horrible embarrassment.