h other well.

Once he trespassed, but that was not to please himself.

"If you need me, you'll still use me?" he said hurriedly, and she
answered, "Yes, of course."

He added, "I can't keep it from Daniel for ever."

"No. It need not be a secret now, except from Notya. And if she lives--"

"She may live for a long time if she has no shock."

"Ah, then," Helen said calmly, "she must not know."

He found her more beautiful than she had been, for now her serenity was
by conquest, not by nature, and her head was carried with a freer grace.
It might have been the freedom of one who had gained through loss and
had the less weight to carry, but he tortured himself with wondering
what fuller knowledge had given her maturer grace. Of this he gave no
sign, and the attitude he maintained had its merciful result on Helen,
for if he pretended not to need her, she had a nightly visitor who told
her dumbly of his longing. Love bred liking, as she had prophesied, and,
because life was lonely, she came to listen for his step. She was born
to minister to people, and the more securely Zebedee shut her out, the
more she was inclined to slip into the place that George had ready for
her. And with George the spring was in conspiracy. The thaw came in a
night, and the next morning's sun began its work of changing a white
country into one of wet and glistening green. Snow lingered and grew
dirty in the hollows, and became marked with the tiny feet of sheep, but
elsewhere the brilliance of the moor was like a cry. It was spring
shouting its release from bonds. Buds leapt on the trees, the melted
snow flooded the streams, tributary ones bubbled and tinkled in
unexpected places.

"Now," Helen said, leaning from the window of Mildred Caniper's room,
"you can't help getting well. Oh, how it smells and looks and feels!
When the ground is drier, you shall go for a walk, but you must practise
up here first. Then John shall carry you downstairs."

But Mildred Caniper did not want to be energetic: she sat by the fire in
a cushioned wicker chair, and when Helen looked at the lax figure and
the loosened lines of the face she recognized the woman who had made
confession to relieve a mind that had finished with all struggling. It
was not the real Mildred Caniper who had told that story in the night;
it was the one who, weakened by illness, was content to sit with folded
hands by the fireside.

She dimmed the sun for Helen and robbed the spring of