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.
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