pmother!" Miriam cried. "If
stepmothers are not witches they ought to be dunces. Everybody knows
that. I'll worry her till she sends us both to boarding-school."

Mildred Caniper was not to be coerced. Her mouth grew more puckered, her
eyes more serious, and her tongue sharper; for though anger, as she
found, was useless, sarcasm was potent, and in time Miriam gave up the
battle. But she did not intend to forgive Mildred Caniper for a single
injury, and even now that she was almost woman she refused her own
responsibility. Notya had arranged her life, and the evil of it, at
least, should be laid at Notya's door.

CHAPTER IV

For Helen, the moor was a personality with moods flecking the solid
substance of its character, and even Miriam, who avowed her hatred of
its monotony, had to admit an occasional difference. There were days
when she thought it was full of secrets and capable of harbouring her
own, and there were other days when she forgot its little hills and
dales and hiding-places and saw it as a large plain, spread under the
glaring eye of the sun, and shelterless, so that when she walked there
she believed that her body and, in some mysterious way, her soul, were
visible to all men.

Such a day was that on which Uncle Alfred was expected. Miriam went out
with a basket on her arm to find flowers for the decoration of his room,
and she had no sooner banged the garden door behind her and mounted the
first rise than she suffered from this sensation of walking under a
spyglass of great size. There was a wonderful clearness everywhere. The
grass and young heather were a vivid green, the blue of the sky had a
certain harshness and heavily piled clouds rolled across it. Miriam
stood on a hillock and gazed at the scene which looked as though
something must happen to it under the concentration of the eye behind
the glass, but she saw nothing more than the familiar things: the white
road cutting the moor, Brent Farm lying placidly against the gentle
hillside, the chimneys of Halkett's Farm rising amid trees, and her own
home in its walled garden, and, as she looked, a new thought came to
her. Perhaps her expectation was born of a familiarity so intense as to
be unreal and rarely recognized, and with the thought she shut her eyes
tightly and in despair. Nothing would happen. She did not live in a
country subject to convulsions, and when she opened her eyes the same
things would still be there; yet, to give Provi