That's the best
of this place. You can do what you like in it. There's nobody to see
you."
("Counting me," he thought, "as nobody.")
"I should like to do it, too," he said--"to go out before sunrise--if
I hadn't got to. If I did it for fun--like you."
He knew he would not really have liked it. But his romantic youth
persuaded him in that moment that he would.
XVII
Mary was up in the attic, the west attic that looked on to the road
through its shy gable window.
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.
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