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That is, not until she was on the point of picking up her nightdress from the bed, when her hand became still and she looked at the bundle of drooping voile. She looked at it for quite a long while before releasing it from her hand and turning round. And now she began to walk about the room as she had never done before. It was a strange feeling to walk about like this, unclothed. Back and forward, up and down she walked. And as she walked she listened, and just after the half hour was up she heard movements in the room below, followed by the sound of the front door being locked.

As she heard his steps mounting the stairs a tremor passed over her and she became still. She would time his steps across the landing, and when he opened the bedroom door she would be in the act of walking across the room. But when he opened the door she was sitting at the dressing-table, her naked back to him, and the entire front of her body gleaming at him through the mirror.

There are moments in a lifetime when all the five senses of the body are in agony at once. It is torture that dare not be repeated often.

It is a torture that breaks the mind before the body. At such times you can smell your own humiliation, you can taste your own despair.

You can feel the actual recoil of the other's revulsion. You can see the disgust squaring a mouth to leave the teeth bare. You can hear the hateful crying of self-denouncement.

Grace experienced this agony when through the mirror she met his look, for not only his expression but his whole body showed his reactions to her nakedness. It shrivelled her up. She couldn't endure it. It was as if he was being forced to look at some debauched creature. He looked like a trapped priest. As she clapped her hand over her mouth she cried through her fingers, "Don't look at me like that!"

"I'd put your nightdress on; it ill becomes you to act in this way.

Grace. "

Even before the deadly cold words were finished he had turned 'and closed the door, not quietly as was his wont but with a bang. With her hand still tightly pressed across her mouth she stared wildly into the mirror and she saw there, not her own flesh but a verse of Genesis:

"AND SHE CAUGHT HIM BY HIS GARMENT, SAYING, LIE WITH ME: AND HE LEFT

HIS GARMENT IN HER HAND, AND FLED, AND GOT HIM OUT.

"

He had looked at her as Joseph must have done on the wife of his Egyptian master . but she was no-one else's wife, she was his wife .

but he didn't want a wife, not to lie with. She had clutched at his garment with her naked body and what had happened? He had got him out.

Oh God! Oh God! Her body dragged itself round away from the mirror, but although she stared about the room she could see nothing, for her vision was blurred. Yet she was not crying. She bent over and covered her face with her hands, "Oh God! Oh God!"

She was still muttering "Oh God! Oh God!" when she made a sudden rush towards her clothes and, tearing at them, began frantically to dress herself again.

When she had zipped the side of her dress up her movements stopped.

Her two hands underneath her armpits, she looked down at the carpet and asked, "Where will I go? Aunt Aggie's.... No, no. " But her Aunt Aggie would understand, she knew she would understand. Yet how could she put into words what she had done to bring about this situation?

And would anyone understand this unbearable feeling of rejection . ?

She couldn't go on, she couldn't. She was unclean. He had stamped her forever as something unclean.

She went through the storeroom without switching the light on, and when she ran down the iron steps to the garden the night appeared light in comparison. Hardly pausing in her running, she snatched the key to the garden gate from the nail just within the door of the greenhouse, and when she had unlocked the gate she did not stop to close it, or to remove the key, but ran across the narrow belt of grass and into the wood.

She had never been in the wood at night before, not even in the twilight, and if she had been in her right mind the darkness would have terrified her. But there was no room for terror in her at this moment, there was no room for anything but shame and a desire to be rid of it as soon as possible. She ran with her arms outstretched, warding off obstacles, and when she stumbled for the third time she went flat on the ground. As she lay breathless and dazed she imagined in the stillness all round her that she could hear the sound of footsteps.

Still she was not frightened, only determined that the footsteps should never catch up with her.

She was running again and her feet told her when she had reached the stone road. She flew along it with a surety, as if she could see her way ahead, and she was at the wire fencing before she realised it, for its impact nearly knocked her on to her back. It was as she bent under the wire that she saw the light of a torch spreading into the trees, but she was in the enclosure and she knew that he would never find her here, not until she had done what she had come to do.

She had never told him about her visits to the quarry, she did not think he even knew of its existence. Once through the narrow lane of brambles she did not make for the mud beach but began to scramble over the shoulders up towards the top of the shelf of rock. At the far end there was a sixty-foot drop, and at the foot of the cliff there was no mud, just huge lumps of quarrying stone overgrown with bracken.

When the sharp stinging drops of rain hit her face, they pierced through the unbalanced state of her mind and brought her climbing to a gasping halt, and she thought for a moment with normal surprise, "It's raining." Then once again she was scrambling frantically upwards. She could hear quite clearly now the sound of Donald running, and she knew that her own footsteps were leading him to her, and she cried to herself, "If he touches me I'll kill him, I'll kill him kill him."

When her feet reached the comparatively level ground on the top of the quarry the blackness, intensified by the rain, took all sense of her bearings from her and she ran this way and that not knowing in what dire con the edge lay. When the torch flashed over her, she blinked into it before turning and rushing blindly away. A second later she was struggling like a wildcat. It was only when she realised that the arms that were holding her were hard, not soft and flabby, that she became still.

"There, there, you're all right. Go easy, don't be frightened." The voice enfolded her, soothing her. She remained still against the man, her head resting on his shoulder until she began to shake as if with ague. A torrent of tears seemed to have solidified and blocked her throat, stopping her breath and causing her to heave as if she was being suffocated. When his voice came again, saying with deep gentleness, "Don't be frightened, nothing can harm you', it was too much. She made a sound that could have come from an agonised animal before the tears spurted from her eyes, nose and mouth at the same time.

Ill

"There now, there now, don't, don't cry so. Look you're getting wet.

Put this round you. " She felt him putting his coat over her shoulders, she felt herself being led back down over the boulders, and she was only vaguely aware that they had passed the rock point and the place where she had first seen him lying.

"Sit down here a minute, it's dry and out of the rain." He lowered her to the ground, and when his hands left her she turned and lay on the earth and buried her face in her arms.

After some long time his voice forced its way to her, saying, "No more now, no more. You'll make yourself ill. Come on, sit up."

But she could not sit up. Her body was being rent apart with her weeping, and he said no more, only patted her gently until slowly, gradually, the turmoil subsided and she lay quiet and exhausted.

As she stared into the black inkiness of the earth, her mind began to settle and find its balance once more, and it came to her that she was lying up here in the quarry beside Andrew Maclntyre and that he must think her insane. Slowly she eased herself up into a sitting position and, her words checked by her jerking breath, she said softly, "I... I don't know what... what to say. I don't know what you must think of me."

"I think you're very unhappy."

She felt herself jerk as if she had been prodded. She could not see him but she knew that his eyes were on her.

"You've been unhappy for a long time, haven't you?"

She felt her face stretching with amazement. Nobody had known how she felt, nobody had known that she was unhappy. She had seen to it that she had talked and laughed as usual, and Donald had seen to it that he was very sweet to her, even lovable, in public.

She heard her voice, hardly audible and still uneven with her sobbing breath, asking, "How how did you know that?"

"I've watched you."

"Watched me?" She turned her face full in his direction, and now she could just make out the dark outline of him. She had not met him more than a dozen times since she had seen him lying on the beach here.

That encounter would always remain in her memory, for it had driven her to church. She remembered praying that day that Donald would love her and that she would never stop loving him. She had never come across Andrew Maclntyre in the quarry since that day. She had only come here when, like him, she felt she would be alone. Her encounters with him

'had been on the road or at the Tooles' when she had seen him working on the farm.

"You're not happy with him, are you?"

As she had flown only a few minutes ago from the house she now wanted to fly away from this man.

"Why did you marry him?"

She heard herself saying softly, "I loved him."

"You thought you did."

"You mustn't say such things."

"Why? Because you're the parson's wife or because you won't face up to the truth?"

She felt his hand groping towards her, and when it covered hers she made no resistance.

"I don't know your name, your Christian name, they always call you Mrs.

Rouse up there. I've given you all kinds of names ... what is it?"

Her mind was starting to whirl again but in a different atmosphere, and her voice was just a whisper as she said, "Grace."

"Grace."

She shuddered and blinked in the dark, terrified now of something she couldn't name. She made an effort to get away from it by saying, "I I must get back," but she made no move to rise. And then she asked, "Why were you in the wood?"

"I was coming from work." He paused, then said hastily and below his breath, "No, that isn't true. I was standing on the edge of the wood I often go down there and I heard you running through the garden. I thought you were having a game with someone. You passed me not more than an arm's length away, and I waited to see who was after you, and when nobody came I knew you were in trouble. I think I knew it from the minute I heard you running."

Her head was bowed low now as she asked, "Why were you down there?"

There was another considerable pause before he gave her an answer, and then it was not to her question.

"That day you appeared round the bend there, I'd been thinking of you; I was thinking of you that very minute and I opened my eyes and there you stood. I'll never be able to explain what I felt then, but I can tell you now. I knew then what I had guessed from the first time I saw you: I knew you were for me, the only one for me, parson's wife or no."

She knew a moment's horror and made to scramble to her feet, but his hand, without moving, held her to the ground.

"Don't be frightened you have nothing to fear from me. Sooner or later you'd have to know.

Things happen like this, no matter what people &uy, and it happened to me that day in your kitchen when I first set eyes on you. "

She turned her face towards him again and her expression was full of wonder now. This was Andrew Maclntyre, the dour Scot. He was talking with the ease which she attributed only to men like Donald, and he was telling her. What was he telling her? That he was in love with her?

Again she recalled the day she had run from the quarry through the woods to the church, and there came to her now the real reason for her praying. She, too, had known it then, but would not face it; she was the parson's wife and she loved her husband. But she was confronted with it now and some part of her still protested loudly: "This mustn't happen. It is wrong, this mustn't go on. There must be nothing between me and Andrew Maclntyre. It would be a situation that would be unbearable. Andrew Maclntyre, Mr. Toole's man ... Andrew Maclntyre, a farm-worker ... Andrew Maclntyre who lives in the little stone cottage on the fells ... Andrew Maclntyre, who was dour, unsociable, taciturn and who wouldn't play the bagpipes at the musical evening."

On this last thought something faintly resembling a laugh passed through her, and she found herself turning her body towards him and allowing a breath of a whisper to say his name, "Oh, Andrew." The next minute she was enveloped in a storm of weeping again. When his arms went about her and she felt herself pressed close against him she did not protest in any way, and when a short while later she felt his mouth moving against her temple she said again, "Oh, Andrew." Of her own will she moved her mouth up to meet his. And when with a sudden jerk his body pressed hard against her and bore her sideways to the earth she did not shrink away.

The passionate abandon with which she gave herself to him both startled and elated her, and the knowledge that she was being loved brought compensation for her husband's rejection and gave her a shield to hold up against the look that the sight of her nakedness had brought to his face. She had, as it were, had a painful

' abscess lanced, and the relief was indescribable, i Somewhere at the height of the ecstatic, swirling I pinnacle of released joy she thought that those lines's in Genesis were being justifiably reversed.

It was the I Egyptian who would not lie with her, but Joseph had, ; and his cloak was over her and she knew he would never lift it from her.

"Oh, girl, what have you done? And I'm not referring to that Maclntyre fellow either, although I think he's a swine of the first water."