Night and morning she called to her sister: "Oh Gwenda, come and feel my heart. I do believe it's growing. It's getting too big for my body. It frightens me when it jumps about like that."
It frightened Gwenda.
But it did not really frighten Alice. She rejoiced in it, rather, and exulted. After all, it was a good thing that she had not got pneumonia, which might have killed her as it had killed John Greatorex. She had got what served her purpose better. It served all her purposes. If she had tried she could not have hit on anything that would have annoyed her father more or put him more conspicuously in the wrong. To begin with, it was his doing. He had worried her into it. And he had brought her to a place which was the worst place conceivable for anybody with a diseased heart, since you couldn't stir out of doors without going up hill.
Night and morning Alice stood before the looking-glass and turned out the lining of her lips and eyelids and saw with pleasure the pale rose growing paler. Every other hour she laid her hand on her heart and took again the full thrill of its dangerous throbbing, or felt her pulse to assure herself of the halt, the jerk, the hurrying of the beat. Night and morning and every other hour she thought of Rowcliffe.
"If it goes on like this, they'll have to send for him," she said.
But it had gone on, the three weeks had passed, and yet they had not sent. The Vicar had put his foot down. He wouldn't have the doctor. He knew better than a dozen doctors what was the matter with his daughter Alice.
Alice said nothing. She simply waited. As if some profound and dead-sure instinct had sustained her, she waited, sickening.
And on the last night of the third week she fainted. She had dragged herself upstairs to bed, staggered across the little landing and fallen on the threshold of her room.
They kept her in bed next day. At one o'clock she refused her chicken-broth. She would neither eat nor drink. And a little before three Gwenda went for the doctor.
She had not told Alice she was going. She had not told anybody.