Miss Gwenda let
her have him with her on the nights when Mrs. Gale slept up at the
Farm.
It was quiet in the Vicarage kitchen. The door into the back yard was
shut, the door that Essy used to keep open when she listened for a
footstep and a whisper. That door had betrayed her many a time when
the wind slammed it to.
Essy's heart was quiet as the heart of her sleeping child. She had
forgotten how madly it had leaped to her lover's footsteps, how it
had staggered at the slamming of the door. She had forgotten the tears
that she had shed when Alice's wild music had rocked the house, and
what the Vicar had said to her that night when she spilled the glass
of water in the study.
But she remembered that Gwenda had given her son his first little
Sunday suit; and that, before Jimmy came, when Essy was in bed, crying
with the face-ache, she had knocked at her door and said, "What is it,
Essy? Can I do anything for you?" She could hear her saying it now.
Essy's memory was like that.
She had thought of Gwenda just then because she heard the sound of Dr.
Rowcliffe's motor car tearing up the Dale.
* * * * *
The woman in the other room heard it too. She had heard its horn
hooting on the moor road nearly a mile away.
She raised her hand and listened. It hooted again, once, twice,
placably, at the turning of the road, under Karva. She shivered at the
sound.
It hooted irritably, furiously, as the car tore through the village.
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