And now she knew that it was there.  It had been told her in four words:  “He never saved himself.”

She might have known it.  For she remembered things, now; how he had nursed old Greatorex like a woman; how he had sat up half the night with Jim Greatorex’s mare Daisy; how he kept Jim Greatorex from drinking; and how he had been kind to poor Essy when she had the face ache; and gentle to little Ally.

And now Ned Alderson’s ridiculous baby would live and Rowcliffe would die.  Was that what she had required of him?  She felt as if somehow she had done it; as if her innermost secret self, iniquitously exacting, had thrown down the gage into the arena and that he had picked it up.

“He saved others.  Himself he”—­never saved.

He had become god-like to her.

And the passion she had trampled on lifted itself and passed into the phase of adoration.  It had received the dangerous sanction of the soul.

* * * * *

She turned off the high road at the point where, three months ago, she had seen Mary cycling up the hill from Morfe.  Now, as then, she descended upon Morfe by the stony lane from the moor below Karva.

It came over her that she was too late, that she would see rows of yellow blinds drawn down in the long front of Rowcliffe’s house.

The blinds were up.  The windows looked open-eyed upon the Green.  She noticed that one of them on the first floor was half open, and she said to herself, “He is up there, in that room, dying of diphtheria.”

The sound of the bell, muffled funereally, at the back of the house, fulfilled her premonition.

The door opened wide.  The maid stood back from it to let her pass in.

“How is Dr. Rowcliffe?”

Her voice sounded abrupt and brutal, as it tore its way from her tense throat.

The maid raised her eyebrows.  She held the door wider.

“Would you like to see him, miss?”

“Yes.”

Her throat closed on the word and choked it.

Down at the end of the passage, where it was dark, a door opened, the door of the surgery, and a man came out, went in as if to look for something, and came out again.

As he moved there in the darkness she thought it was the strange doctor and that he had come out to forbid her seeing Rowcliffe.  He would say that she mustn’t risk the infection.  As if she cared about the risk.

Perhaps he wouldn’t see her.  He, too, might say she mustn’t risk it.

While the surgery door opened and shut, opened and shut again, she saw that her seems him was of all things the most unlikely.  She remembered the house at Upthorne, and she knew that Rowcliffe was lying dead in the room upstairs.

And the man there was coming out to stop her.

* * * * *

Only—­in that case—­why hadn’t they drawn the blinds down?