Until half an hour ago (she was aware of it) there had been something lacking in her feeling. Mary and Ally (this she was not aware of) got more "out of" Rowcliffe, so to speak, than she did. Gwenda had known nothing approaching to Mary's serene and brooding satisfaction or Ally's ecstasy. She dreaded the secret gates, the dreamy labyrinths, the poisonous air of the Paradise of Fools. In Rowcliffe's presence she had not felt altogether safe or altogether happy. But, if she stood on the edge of an abyss, at least she stood there, firm on the solid earth. She could balance herself; she could even lean forward a little and look over, without losing her head, thrilled with the uncertainty and peril of the adventure. And of course it wasn't as if Rowcliffe had left her standing. He hadn't. He had held out his hand to her, as it were, and said, "Let's get on—get on!" which was as good as saying that, as long as it lasted, it was their adventure, not hers. He had drawn her after him at an exciting pace, along the edge of the abyss, never losing his head for a minute, so that she ought to have felt safe with him. Only she hadn't. She had said to herself, "If I knew him better, if I saw what was in him, perhaps I should feel safe."
There was something she wanted to see in him; something that her innermost secret self, fastidious and exacting, demanded from him before it would loosen the grip that held her back.
And now she knew that it was there. It had been told her in four words: "He never saved himself."
She might have known it. For she remembered things, now; how he had nursed old Greatorex like a woman; how he had sat up half the night with Jim Greatorex's mare Daisy; how he kept Jim Greatorex from drinking; and how he had been kind to poor Essy when she had the face ache; and gentle to little Ally.
And now Ned Alderson's ridiculous baby would live and Rowcliffe would die. Was that what she had required of him? She felt as if somehow she had done it; as if her innermost secret self, iniquitously exacting, had thrown down the gage into the arena and that he had picked it up.
"He saved others. Himself he"—never saved.
He had become god-like to her.
And the passion she had trampled on lifted itself and passed into the phase of adoration. It had received the dangerous sanction of the soul.
* * * * *
She turned off the high road at the point where, three months ago, she had seen Mary cycling up the hill from Morfe. Now, as then, she descended upon Morfe by the stony lane from the moor below Karva.