midnights
Even Rowcliffe was taken in by it . He called it a morbid obsession . And he began to wonder whether he had not been mistaken about Ally after all , whether her nature was not more subtle and sensitive than he had guessed , more intricately and dangerously mixed . For the sadness of the desolate land , of the naked hillsides , of the moor marshes with their ghostly mists ; the brooding of the watchful , solitary house , the horror of haunted twilights , of nightfall and of midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his cattle and she lay alone under the white ceiling that sagged above her bed and heard the weak wind picking at the pane ; her fear of Maggie and of what Maggie had been to Greatorex and might be again ; her fear of the savage , violent and repulsive elements in the man who was her god ; her fear of her own repulsion ; the tremor of her recoiling nerves ; premonitions of her alien blood , the vague melancholy of her secret motherhood ; they were all mingled together and hidden from her in the vast gloom of her one fear . And once the dominant terror was set up , her instinct found a thousand ways of strengthening it . Through her adoration of her lover her mind had become saturated with his mournful consciousness of sin . In their moments of contrition they were both convinced that they would be punished .