‘Not you, John.’

‘And why not?’

‘Because she will be – very much ashamed.’

‘I hope so. This is no time for softness.’

They spoke in undertones, as if there was someone who might hear them in the empty room. In the end Mary got her way.

John Lenton went back to the study at the other side of the house and sat there writing letters, clearing up his desk, with anger in his mind and an urge to vent it. He had left the bedroom to Mary, but she need not think he would forbear to speak his mind when Ellie came home.

Mary Lenton sat there in the dark. The thing was unbelievable, but it had to be believed. She looked back through all the years of Ellie’s life. She was five years the younger. Mary remembered her very small and pretty in her pram. She remembered the gentle little girl who was always good, the delicate girl in her teens who was never quite strong enough to play games or take long walks. That it should be Ellie who had climbed out of her window to meet a man just did not seem as if it could be true.

She pushed a chair up level with the window and to one side of it, so that when Ellie came back she would not see her until she had climbed right into the room. She did not have to push it far, because it was the chair in which Ellie had sat to watch the road from Ford House. Mary’s mind was so full of unhappiness that she had no sense of the passing of time. She had never seen John in such anger. His household, which should have been a pattern, to become a byword! His home with Mary and his children in it to be the setting for a sordid intrigue! For this time at least there was no room for mercy, and Ellie would get none.

Mary could think of no way out. John would make her send Ellie away. There would be no one to help with the children. He wouldn’t let Ellie teach them any more, he wouldn’t let her be with them. And where were they to send her? There was no one but old Aunt Annabel, and she would want to know why they couldn’t keep her themselves. The longer she went on thinking about it, the more dreadfully difficult it was. If John would only help instead of piling up his anger on the top of everything else. Of course Ellie must be talked to and got to see how wrong she had been. And she must give up meeting Geoffrey Ford, who ought to be ashamed of himself. If she did that, the talk would die down. Mrs Collen was a coarse-tongued woman who thought she could stick up for her daughter by accusing somebody else. It was silly of John to think that he could do any good by going for her about Olive. She would have tried to stop him if she had known, but it probably wouldn’t have been any good. Men were so headstrong, and they always thought they knew best.

Soft as it was, she heard Ellie’s footstep as it came round the side of the house. She had run till there was no more breath in her. She had not known when there was grass under her feet, or when there was gravel. She had scarcely known that it was dark. She had been driven by terror, as a leaf is driven before the wind. She ran from the pool – through the gap in the hedge, and across the lawn, and through the shrubbery, and down the drive of Ford House. She ran out upon the road and along it. But when she came to the Vicarage gate the pace slackened. She came in past the tall shapes of the dahlias – black leaves, black sculptured flowers in a thicket of darkness – and she came, slow and dragging, to the pear-tree under her window. She took hold of it and stood there panting, straining for breath. It had been easy enough to climb down, but how was she going to get up again? There was no strength in her, no breath. She leaned forward over her hands and held on to the pear-tree.

Mary Lenton was on her feet, pressed back against the wall. What had happened – what could possibly have happened? She had not thought that anything could be worse than to sit here waiting for Ellie to come back. But this was worse, far worse. She was afraid to call out, to move, to do anything.

And then, very slowly and with sobbing breath, Ellie set a foot on the lowest branch of the pear-tree and began to climb. Mary moved then. The dressing-table stood across the corner just beyond her. There was a light-switch there. She moved until she could reach it. And waited. Ellie’s hands groped and clung to the stretched boughs, her feet stumbled and slipped, her breath caught in her throat. It was terrible to listen and not help her, but if she were startled Ellie might fall. It came to Mary Lenton then that you can’t always help the people you love – they must help themselves. It came to her that Ellie must find her own way back.

Painfully and very, very slowly Ellie was finding this part of her way. A shadow rose beyond the sill, the laboured breathing was in the room. There was a moment when the dark shape at the window seemed to hang there motionless, there was another moment when it moved again. With the last of her strength Ellie put a knee on the windowsill and dragged herself over it. She caught at the drawn-back curtain and stood there swaying.

And then the light came on. She saw the room, and Mary, her hand dropping from the switch. Her lips parted, but no sound came from them. Mary looked at her, aghast. Her jumper, her cardigan, all the front of her skirt, was soaked and dripping. She said,

‘Ellie!’

Ellie Page stared at her blankly. Her hands slipped from the curtain. The floor in front of her tilted and she went down – down – down.

It took so long to revive her, and the consciousness to which she did eventually return was of so precarious a nature, that John Lenton’s righteous indignation failed him and he agreed without demur to whatever Mary suggested.

‘I can’t leave her, John – she isn’t fit to be left.’

He looked down at the strained white face on the pillow. They had lifted her on to the bed and covered her. She was deathly cold. He had filled hot-water bottles and heated milk. Until this moment there had been no time for anything but fear and haste. Now quite suddenly he said,

‘Why had you taken off her things?’ And then, more sharply, ‘She hadn’t been out like that?’

Mary did not know just what prompted her answer. She was the most candid of women, but – you don’t tell a man everything where another woman is concerned. She didn’t know just why she had taken off the soaked jumper, the cardigan and skirt, and the wet shoes and stockings before she ran for John. There was, perhaps, some vague idea that Ellie might have tried to drown herself, and that there was no need for him to know. She had stripped the wet things off and pushed them out of sight. When John was asleep she could put them down in the kitchen to dry. She looked at him by the light of the candle which he had shaded from Ellie’s eyes and said without a tremor, ‘I thought she would be more comfortable without them.’