ng for existence."

"Miriam has an existence, too, you know," Rupert said.

From the other side of the hall there came a faint chink of plates and
Miriam's low voice singing.

"She's all right," John assured himself.

Helen was smiling tenderly at the sound. "But I wonder why Notya is so
hard on her," she sighed.

Rupert knocked his pipe against the fender. "I should be very glad to
know what our mother was like," he said.

Long ago, out of excess of loyalty, the Canipers had tacitly agreed not
to discuss those matters on which their stepmother was determinedly
reserved, and now a certain tightening of the atmosphere revealed the
fact that John and Helen were controlling their desires to ask Rupert
what he meant.

CHAPTER III

The Canipers had lived on the moor for sixteen years, and Rupert was the
only one of the children who had more distant memories. These were like
flashes of white light on general darkness, for the low house of his
memory was white and the broad-leaved trees of the garden cast their
shadows on a pale wall: there was a white nursery of unlimited
dimensions and a white bath-room with a fluffy mat which comforted the
soles of his feet and tickled his toes. Another recollection was of the
day when a lady already faintly familiar to him was introduced by an
officious nurse as his new mother, and when he looked up at her, with
interest in her relationship and admiration for her prettiness, he saw
her making herself look very tall and stern as she said clearly, "I am
not your mother, Rupert."

"Notya mother," he echoed amiably, and so Mildred Caniper received her
name.

As he grew older, he wondered if he really remembered this occasion or
whether Notya herself had told him of it, but he knew that the house and
the garden wall and the nursery were true. True, too, was a dark man
with a pointed beard whom he called his father, who came and went and at
last disappeared; and his next remembrance was of the moor, the biggest
thing he had ever seen, getting blacker and blacker as the carriage-load
of Canipers jogged up the road. The faces of his stepmother, the
nursemaid, John and the twins, were like paper lanterns on the
background of night, things pale and impermanent, swaying to the
movements of the carriage while this black, outspread earth threatened
them, and, with the quick sympathy natural to him even then, he knew
that Notya was afraid of something too. Then the horse stopped and