A person less simple than Helen would have readjusted her conception of herself, her character and circumstances, in the light of her new knowledge; but with the passionate assertion that she could not be held altogether responsible for what her own children might have to suffer, Helen had made her final personal comment. For a day, her thoughts hovered about the distant drama of which Mildred Caniper was the memento, like a dusty programme found when the play itself is half forgotten, and Helen's love grew with her added pity; but more urgent matters were knocking at her mind, and every morning, when she woke, two facts had forced an entrance. She was nearer to Zebedee by a night, and only the daylight separated her from George and what he might demand and, outside, the moor was covered with thick snow, as cold as her own mind.

A great fire burned in Mildred Caniper's room, another in the kitchen; the only buds on the poplars were frozen white ones, and the whiteness of the lawn was pitted with Halkett's footsteps. Since the first day of snow he had climbed the garden wall close to the kitchen door so that he should not make another trail, but the original one still gaped there, and Helen wished more snow would fall and hide the tracks. She saw them every morning when she went into her own room to dress, and they were deep and black, like open mouths begging the clouds for food.

One day, John, looking from the kitchen window, asked who had been tramping about the garden.

"Doesn't it look ugly?" Helen said. "I can't bear snow when it's blotched with black. Is there going to be more of it?"

"I think so."

"Are your lambs all right?"

"We haven't lost one. Lily's a wonder with them. We've a nursery in our kitchen. Come and see it." He went out, and she heard him on the crisp snow.

"Now he'll mix the trail," she thought happily. "And I might have done it myself. I think I'm growing stupid. But it will be John and George when I get up in the morning: that's better than George and me."

John came back and spoke gravely. "I find those footsteps go right across the moor towards Halkett's Farm."

"Of course! George made them."

"Oh, you knew?"

"Yes. I couldn't imagine Jim had done it, could I?"

"What did he come for?"

"He sat by the fire and smoked."

"You'd better not encourage him."

"I don't."

"Be careful!—What are you laughing at?"

"That old story of the kiss!"

"It makes me mad."

"He doesn't try to kiss me, John. I shouldn't be horrified if he did. You needn't be afraid for me."

"All right. It's your affair. Want any wood chopped?"

"Rupert did a stack for me."

"This is pretty dull for you, isn't it? When does—"

She interrupted. "At the end of next week, I think." She was somewhat tired of answering the question.

That night, as she sat with George, he said, "When we're like this, I wish you'd wear your wedding-ring."

"I said I wouldn't."

"It couldn't do any harm."

"It could—to me."

"You talk as if it's dirt," he said.

"Oh, no, I know it's gold! Let's keep our bargains and talk of something else. Tell me what you have been doing today."

His face reddened to a colour that obscured his comeliness. "You can't get round me like that."

"What do you mean?" She lifted her head so that he saw her round white throat. "Why should I condescend to get round you, as you call it?"

"That's it!" he shouted angrily. "That's the word!" He rose and knocked his pipe against the stove. "You're too damned free with your condescension, and I'm sick of it." He left the kitchen angrily, and two minutes later she heard the distant banging of the garden door.

She wanted to run after him, for she was afraid of the impulses of his anger. She felt a dreadful need to conciliate, for no other reason than his body's greater strength, but she let him go, and though for several days she did not see him, she had no sense of liberty. He would come back, she knew, and she found herself planning unworthy little shifts, arranging how she would manage him if he did this or that, losing her birthright of belief that man and woman could meet and traffic honestly together. They could not do it, she found, when either used base weapons: she, her guile, or he, his strength; but if he used his strength, how could she save herself from using guile? She had to use it, and she clung fiercely to it, though she knew that, at last, it would be wrested from her.

In these days of his absence, there were hours when she wandered ceaselessly through the house, urged by the pride which refused allegiance to this man, tortured by her love for Zebedee and the pain she had to give him, hunted by the thought that George was making for himself a place in the circle where she kept her pensioners. Each time that he looked at her with longing, though she shrank, she gave her ready pity, and when he walked away into the night, her heart went after him unwillingly. Worse than all, she knew she would not always see him as a pensioner. Far off and indistinct, like a gallows seen on a distant hill, she spied the day when she might own a kind of need of him; she had to love those who loved her enough, and his strength, the very limits of his mind, ............