And (to make it worse, if anything could make it) there was Mary standing at the foot of the bed and staring at her. Mary knew perfectly well that he was thinking how awful she was. It was what Mary thought herself.
If only Gwenda had stayed with her! But Gwenda had left the room when she saw Rowcliffe take out his stethescope.
And as it flashed on Ally what Rowcliffe was thinking of her, her heart stopped as if it was never going on again, then staggered, then gave a terrifying jump.
* * * * *
Rowcliffe had done with Ally's little wrist. He laid it down on the counterpane, not brutally at all, but gently, almost tenderly, as if it had been a thing exquisitely fragile and precious.
He rose to his feet and looked at her, and then, all of a sudden, as he looked, Rowcliffe became young again; charmingly young, almost boyish. And, as if faintly amused at her youth, faintly touched by her fragility, he smiled. With a mouth and with eyes from which all austerity had departed he smiled at Alice.
(It was all over. He had done with her. He could afford to be kind to her as he would have been kind to a little, frightened child.)
And Alice smiled back at him with her white face between the pale gold, serious bands of platted hair.
She was no longer frightened. She forgot his austerity as if it had never been. She saw that he hadn't thought her awful in the least. He couldn't have looked at her like that if he had.
A sense of warmth, of stillness, of soft happiness flooded her body and her brain, as if the stream of life had ceased troubling and ran with an even rhythm. As she lay back, her tormented heart seemed suddenly to sink into it and rest, to be part of it, poised on the stream.