It is all, in a way, very like the old literary convention of the good people getting married and living happily ever after and the bad ones coming to smash.
And yet there is another way of looking at it—Mary Ambrey’s way.
It was after Martyn and Sallie had gone away, after Christopher’s marriage, and after I had been abroad with Claire for nearly nine weeks. Mary had remained in Cross Loman. It was a very warm spring day, and I had driven her up Loman Hill to the crossroads. The pony stopped of his own accord and turned round, and we looked at the distant hills and the red church tower. It was then that Mary told me she could never come there any more without thinking, with a vividness of thought that amounted to pain, of Mrs. Harter and of Captain Patch.
“Neither can I,” said I.
“The first—no, it was the second—walk that they took together was to this place.”
“Yes. How do you know?”
“She told me.”
“Diamond Harter?”
“Yes,” said Mary.
“I didn’t know that she had ever told anybody anything.”