losing of doors, the shutting
down of lids, the impenetrability of earth.

Sitting next to John, with her arm in his, Lily moved a little. Her eyes
were full of pity, not so much for the woman upstairs, or for the
Canipers, as because the emotions of these people were not the heartily
unmixed ones which she had suffered when her own mother died.

"He's a long time," Helen said. She went into the hall and passed
Miriam, in a black dress, with her hair piled high and a flush of colour
on her cheeks.

"He's in there," Helen said with a wave of her hand, and speaking this
time of Uncle Alfred.

The front door stood open, and she passed through it, but she did not go
beyond the gate. The moor was changelessly her friend, yet George was on
it, and perhaps he, too, called it by that name. She was jealous that he
should, and she did not like to think that the earth under her feet
stretched to the earth under his, that the same sky covered them, that
they were fed by the same air; yet this was not on account of any
enmity, but because the immaterial distance between them was so great
that a material union mocked it.

Evening was slipping into night: there was no more rain, but the ground
smelt richly damp, and seemed to heave a little with life eager to be
free; a cloud, paler than the night, dipped upon the moor above Brent
Farm and rose again, like the sail of a ship seen on a dark sea. Then a
light moving on the road caught back Helen's thoughts and she went into
the house.

"He's coming," she said listlessly, careless of the use of pronouns.
There was a pronoun on a ship, one on the moor, another driving up the
road, and each had an importance and a supremacy that derided a mere
name.

She shut the schoolroom door and waited in the hall, but half an hour
later, she opened the door again.

"It's good news," she said breathlessly. "Do you want to speak to him,
Rupert? She's going to live!"

She could not see her own happiness reflected.

"Like that?" John asked roughly.

"No, better, better. Always in bed, perhaps, but able to speak and
understand."

He lifted his big shoulders; Uncle Alfred flicked something from his
knee and, in the silence, Helen felt forlorn; her brightness faded.

"And you'll be left here with her, alone!" Miriam wailed, at last.

"Alone?" asked John.

"Uncle Alfred's going to take me away," Miriam said, yet she was not
sure of that, and she looked curiously at him.

"I want her to g