Mary lay
as Alice had lain, weak and happy, with her child tucked in the crook
of her arm. And she smiled at it dreamily.
The old doctor and the nurse smiled at Rowcliffe.
It couldn't, they said, have gone off more easily. There hadn't been
any danger, nor any earthly reason to have sent for Harker. Though, of
course, if it had made Rowcliffe happier--!
The old doctor added that if it had been anybody else's wife Rowcliffe
would have known that it was going all right.
And in the evening, when her sister stood again at her bedside, as
Mary lifted the edge of the flannel that hid her baby's face, she
looked at Gwenda and smiled, not dreamily but subtly in a triumph that
was almost malign.
That night Gwenda dreamed that she saw Mary lying dead and with a dead
child in the crook of her arm.
She woke in anguish and terror.
LVIII
Three years passed and six months. The Cartarets had been in Garthdale
nine years.
Gwenda Cartaret sat in the dining-room at the Vicarage alone with her
father.
It was nearly ten o'clock of the March evening. They waited for the
striking of the clock. It would be prayer time then, and after prayers
the Vicar would drag himself upstairs to bed, and in the peace
that slid into the room when he left it Gwenda would go on with her
reading.
She had her sewing in her lap and her book, Bergson's _Evolution
creatrice_ propped open before her on the table.
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