Your conscience has no business to send you to a living death.
Robina's heart ached for poor Gwenda. She wrote and said so. She said
she knew she was a brute for not going back to Gwenda's father. She
would do it if she could, but she simply couldn't. She hadn't got the
nerve.
And Robina did more. She pulled wires and found the curate. That
he was a ritualist was no drawback in Robina's eyes. In fact, she
declared it was a positive advantage. Mr. Grierson's practices would
wake them up in Garthdale. They needed waking. She had added that Mr.
Grierson was well connected, well behaved and extremely good-looking.
Even charity couldn't subdue the merry devil in Robina.
"I can't see," said Mary reading Robina's letter, "what Mr. Grierson's
good looks have got to do with it."
Rowcliffe's face darkened. He thought he could see.
* * * * *
But Mr. Grierson did not wake Garthdale up. It opened one astonished
eye on his practices and turned over in its sleep again. Mr. Grierson
was young, and the village regarded all he did as the folly of his
youth. It saw no harm in Mr. Grierson; not even when he conceived a
Platonic passion for Mrs. Steven Rowcliffe, and spent all his spare
time in her drawing-room and on his way to and from it.
The curate lodged in the village at the Blenkirons' over Rowcliffe's
surgery, and from that vantage ground he lay in wait for Rowcliffe.
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