"Dr. Fell told you?"
"A little. He said it was no secret."
She clenched her hands. "Oh no. That's the worst of it. It's no secret. Everybody knows, and they all turn their heads away. You're alone with it, do you see? They can't talk about it in public; it isn't done. They can't talk about it to me. And I can't mention it either… "
A pause. Then she turned to him almost fiercely.
"You say you understand, and it's nice of you; but you don't! Growing up with the thing… I remember, when Martin and I were tiny children, mother holding us each up to the window so that we could see the prison. She's dead now, you know. And father."
He said, gently, "Don't you think you're making too much of a legend?"
"I told you — you wouldn't understand."
Her voice was dry and monotonous, and he felt a stab. He was conscious of searching desperately for words, feeling his inadequacy every time he found one; yet groping after a common point with her, as he might have groped after a lamp in a haunted room.
"I'm not intelligent about practical things," he said, blankly. "When I get away from books or football, and up against the world, I'm just mixed up. But I think that, whatever you told me, I would understand it, provided it concerned you."
Across the lowlands drifted a clangor of bells. A slow, sad, ancient clangor, which-swung in the air and was a part of it. Far ahead, the church-spire among the oaks caught the last light. Birds twittered into flight from its belfry as the bell notes clashed with iron weariness, and a rook was cawing. They had stopped by a stone bridge over a broad stream. Dorothy Starberth turned and looked at him.