“You mustn’t take it so hard,” he said.  “It’s not as if it wasn’t absolutely curable.  You must take her away.”

Suddenly he remembered that he didn’t particularly want Gwenda to go away.  He couldn’t, in fact, bear the thought of it.

“Better still,” he said, “send her away.  Is there anybody you could send her to?”

“Only Mummy—­my stepmother.”  She smiled through her tears.  “Papa would never let Ally go to her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she ran away from him.”

He tried not to laugh.

“She’s really quite decent, though you mightn’t think it.”  Rowcliffe smiled.  “And she’s fond of Ally.  She’s fond of all of us—­except Papa.  And,” she added, “she knows a lot of people.”

He smiled again.  He pictured the third Mrs. Cartaret as a woman of affectionate gaiety and a pleasing worldliness, so well surrounded by adorers of his own sex that she could probably furnish forth her three stepdaughters from the numbers of those she had no use for.  He was more than ever disgusted with the Vicar who had driven from him a woman so admirably fitted to play a mother’s part.

“She sounds,” he said, “as if she’d be the very one.”

“She would be.  It’s an awful pity.”

“Well,” he said, “we won’t talk any more about it now.  We’ll think of something.  We simply must get her away.”

He was thinking that he knew of somebody—­a doctor’s widow—­who also would be fitted.  If they could afford to pay her.  And if they couldn’t, he would very soon have the right——­

That was what his “we” meant.

Presently he excused himself and went out to see, he said, about getting her some tea.  He judged that if she were left alone for a moment she would pull herself together and be as ready as ever for their walk back to Garthdale.

* * * * *

It was in that moment when he left her that she made her choice.  Not that when her idea had come to her she had known a second’s hesitation.  She didn’t know when it had come.  It seemed to her that it had been with her all through their awful interview.

It was she and not Ally who would have to go away.

She could see it now.

It had been approaching her, her idea, from the very instant that she had come into the room and had begun to speak to him.  And with every word that he had said it had come closer.  But not until her final appeal to him had she really faced it.  Then it became clear.  It crystallised.  There was no escaping from the facts.

Ally would die or go mad if she didn’t marry.

Ally (though Rowcliffe didn’t know it) was in love with him.

And, even if she hadn’t been, as long as they stayed in Garthdale there was nobody but Rowcliffe whom she could marry.  It was her one chance.

And there were three of them there.  Three women to one man.