All too quickly even that night the shadows fall: Pam goes home and encounters the village schoolmaster, a fellow-lodger at the Morlands', the veins in whose forehead stood out always, a thin, frail consumptive, who tortures himself with love of her. This night he waits up for her and makes her try to care for him, as so many others have in the past. Out of pity for him she could not bring herself to deal the one smart blow that the moment required: the strength was lacking, and so she prepares for herself terrible consequences. The plot thickens. The Spawer sees more and more of Pam, he teaches her music, but he is already engaged to a girl in Switzerland of whom Pam knows nothing. He screws up his courage to tell her on one notable day when he goes with her to take dainties and administer comfort to an old dying man. The description of this one afternoon and evening takes up many chapters of the book, and the gradual leading up to the crisis where the Spawer has to tell Pam is wonderfully done.
Exactly at the moment when she acknowledges her sorrow at his departure the schoolmaster emerges out of the blackness and takes her away: she discovers now the Spawer is going that she is in love with him. "'He likes me,'" she says to the accusing consumptive, "'but he doesn't love me. I wish he did.... But I'm not good enough for him. There has never been any question of his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else ... and he may leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I was so unhappy that I began to cry. I couldn't help it. I didn't think he would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And then--and then--you were there and saw. And I love him--I love him--I love him and I tell you....'"
She is fated to take the letter to her lover which she imagines will summon him away from her ... and she fails to deliver it. The schoolmaster discovers her crime, gets it from her and makes her promise to marry him before he will restore it (this is where the actual story becomes unbearably silly--people don't do these things). She decides to run away; the same night the Spawer walks along the cliffs late, and the schoolmaster, who has discovered Pam's flight, shadows him, so clumsily that the Spawer discovers him: they argue on the cliff edge and the Spawer falls over: Pamela hears his scream and goes to the rescue, and the two discover their love for each other at death's door. They are cut off from help by the rising tide.