Night and morning Alice stood before the looking-glass and turned out
the lining of her lips and eyelids and saw with pleasure the pale rose
growing paler. Every other hour she laid her hand on her heart and
took again the full thrill of its dangerous throbbing, or felt her
pulse to assure herself of the halt, the jerk, the hurrying of the
beat. Night and morning and every other hour she thought of Rowcliffe.
"If it goes on like this, they'll _have_ to send for him," she said.
But it had gone on, the three weeks had passed, and yet they had not
sent. The Vicar had put his foot down. He wouldn't have the doctor. He
knew better than a dozen doctors what was the matter with his daughter
Alice.
Alice said nothing. She simply waited. As if some profound and
dead-sure instinct had sustained her, she waited, sickening.
And on the last night of the third week she fainted. She had dragged
herself upstairs to bed, staggered across the little landing and
fallen on the threshold of her room.
They kept her in bed next day. At one o'clock she refused her
chicken-broth. She would neither eat nor drink. And a little before
three Gwenda went for the doctor.
She had not told Alice she was going. She had not told anybody.
XV
She had to walk, for Mary had taken her bicycle. Nobody knew where
Mary had gone or when she had started or when she would be back.
But the four miles between Garth and Morfe were nothing to Gwenda, who
would walk twenty for her own amusement.
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