The old doctor added that if it had been anybody else's wife Rowcliffe would have known that it was going all right.
And in the evening, when her sister stood again at her bedside, as Mary lifted the edge of the flannel that hid her baby's face, she looked at Gwenda and smiled, not dreamily but subtly in a triumph that was almost malign.
That night Gwenda dreamed that she saw Mary lying dead and with a dead child in the crook of her arm.
She woke in anguish and terror.
LVIII
Three years passed and six months. The Cartarets had been in Garthdale nine years.
Gwenda Cartaret sat in the dining-room at the Vicarage alone with her father.
It was nearly ten o'clock of the March evening. They waited for the striking of the clock. It would be prayer time then, and after prayers the Vicar would drag himself upstairs to bed, and in the peace that slid into the room when he left it Gwenda would go on with her reading.
She had her sewing in her lap and her book, Bergson's Évolution créatrice propped open before her on the table. She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked. Toward ten his silence would be broken by a continual sighing and yearning. The Vicar longed for prayer time to come and end his day. But he had decreed that prayer time was ten o'clock and he would not have permitted it to come a minute sooner.
He nursed a book on his knees, but he made no pretence of reading it. He had taken off his glasses and sat with his hands folded, in an attitude of utter resignation to his own will.