Still without a word, she turned from him to the door.
He sprang to open it.
Five minutes later he was aware that his wife had come into the room.
"Has Gwenda gone?" he said.
"Yes. Steven----" There was a small, fluttering fright in Mary"s eyes.
"Is there anything the matter with her?"
"No," he said. "Nothing. Except living with your father."
LXVI
Gwenda had no feeling in her as she left Rowcliffe"s house. Her heart hid in her breast. It was so mortally wounded as to be unaware that it was hurt.
But at the turn of the white road her heart stirred in its hiding-place. It stirred at the sight of Karva and with the wind that brought her the smell of the flowering thorn-trees.
It discerned in these things a power that would before long make her suffer.
She had no other sense of them.
She came to the drop of the road under Karva where she had seen Rowcliffe for the first time.
She thought, "I shall never get away from it."
Far off in the bottom the village waited for her.
It had always waited for her; but she was afraid of it now, afraid of what it might have in store for her. It shared her fear as it crouched there, like a beaten thing, with its huddled houses, naked and blackened as if fire had pa.s.sed over them.
And Essy Gale stood at the Vicarage gate and waited. She had her child at her side. The two were looking for Gwenda.
"I thought mebbe something had "appened t" yo," she said.
As if she had seen what had happened to her she hurried the child in out of her sight.
Ten minutes to ten.
In the small dull room Gwenda waited for the hour of her deliverance.
She had taken up her sewing and her book.
The Vicar sat silent, waiting, he too, with his hands folded on his lap.
And, loud through the quiet house, she heard the sound of crying and Essy"s voice scolding her little son, avenging on him the cruelty of life.
On Greffington Edge, under the risen moon, the white thorn-trees flowered in their glory.
THE END.
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The Return of the Prodigal
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