It seemed to him then that he saw it all. He knew what she was going
for.
"I see. Instead of your sister," he sneered.
"Papa wouldn't let Ally go to her. But he can't stop _me_."
"Oh, no. Nobody could stop _you_."
She smiled softly. She had missed the brutality of his emphasis.
* * * * *
He said to himself that Gwenda was impossible. She was obstinate and
conceited and wrong-headed. She was utterly selfish, a cold mass of
egoism.
"Cold?" He was not so sure. She might be. But she was capable, he
suspected, of adventures. Instead of taking her sister away to have
her chance, she was rushing off to secure it herself. And the irony of
the thing was that it was he who had put it into her head.
Well--she was no worse, and no better--than the rest of them. Only
unlike them in the queerness of her fascination. He wondered how long
it would have lasted?
You couldn't go on caring for a woman like that, who had never cared a
rap about you.
And yet--he could have sworn--Oh, _that_ was nothing. She had only
thought of him because he had been her only chance.
He made himself think these things of her because they gave him
unspeakable consolation.
All the way back to Morfe he thought them, while on his right hand
Karva rose and receded and rose again, and changed at every turn
its aspect and its form. He thought them to an accompaniment of an
interior, persistent voice, the voice of his romantic youth, that said
to him, "That is her hill, her hill--do you remember? That's where you
met her first.
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