When he tried to account to himself for the remembrance he supposed it
must have been the red hair that did it.
And up to the end and to the end of the end Rowcliffe never knew
that, though he had been made subject to a sequence of relentless
inhibitions and of suggestions overpowering in their nature and
persistently sustained, it was ultimately by aid of that one
incongruous and irresistible association that Mary Cartaret had cast
her spell.
He had never really come under it until that moment.
* * * * *
July passed. It was the end of August. To the west Karva and Morfe
High Moor were purple. To the east the bare hillsides with their
limestone ramparts smouldered in mist and sun, or shimmered, burning
like any hillside of the south. The light even soaked into the gray
walls of Garth in its pastures. The little plum-trees in the Vicarage
orchard might have been olive trees twinkling in the sun.
Mary was in the Vicar's bedroom, looking now at the door, and now
at her own image in the wardrobe glass. It was seven o'clock in the
evening and she had chosen a perilous moment for the glass. She wore
a childlike frock of rough green silk; it had no collar but was cut
square at the neck showing her white throat. The square was bordered
with an embroidered design of peacock's eyes. The parted waves of her
red hair were burnished with hard brushing; its coils lay close, and
smooth as a thick round cap.
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