n running
after her, he had certainly been running after somebody. She glanced at
him and he looked very tall as he stood there, as tall as the tinker.

"Why don't you sit down?" she asked quickly, and as he did so she added,
on a new thought, "But perhaps I'm keeping you. Perhaps--Don't wait for
me."

"I've nothing else to do," he told her.

"I spoke to you," she said, "the day after your father died."

"I meant alone," he answered.

They sat in silence after that, and for Helen the smell of heather was
the speech of those immaterial ones who lay about her. Some change had
taken place among the stars: they were paler, nearer, as though they had
grown tired of eminence and wanted commerce with the earth. The great
quiet had failed before the encroachment of little sounds as of
burrowing, nocturnal hunting, and the struggles of a breeze that was
always foiled.

"Do you know what time it is?" Helen asked in a small voice.

He held his watch sideways, but he had to strike a match, and its light
drew all the eyes of the moor.

"Quick!" Helen said.

He was not to be hurried. "Not far off midnight."

"And Rupert's waiting! Good-night, George."

"And you've forgiven me?" he asked as they parted at the gate.

"No." She laughed almost as Miriam might have done, and startled him.
"I'll forgive you," she said, "I'll forgive you when you really hurt
me." She gave him her cool hand and, holding it, he half asked, half
told her, "That's a promise."

"Yes. Good-night."

Slowly she walked through the dark hall, hesitated at the schoolroom
door and opened it.

"I've come back," she said, and disappeared before Rupert could reply,
for she was afraid he would make some allusion to the tinker.

It was characteristic of her that, as she undressed, carefully laying
her clothes aside, her concern was for George's moral welfare rather
than for the safety of the person for whom he had mistaken her, and this
was because she happened to know George, had known him nearly all her
life, while the identity of the other was a blank to her, because she
had no peculiar feeling for her sex; men and women were separated or
united only by their claim on her.

Mildred Caniper, whose claim was great, came down to breakfast the next
morning with a return of energy that gladdened Helen and set Miriam
thinking swiftly of all the things she had left undone. But Mildred
Caniper was fair, and where she no longer ruled, she would not
criticiz