nd it or not, so long as
you try. Promise you'll do that. I'll bring some books tomorrow. Take
them as medicine and you'll find they're food. And, Helen"--he was at
the gate and he looked back at her--"you are rather like a blade
yourself."

He knew the curing properties of praise.

CHAPTER XXXIV

When evening came, the blue colour of the sky had changed to one that
was a memory of the earth's new green. Helen went through the garden to
the moor and sat there on a grey rock out of which her own grey figure
might have been carved. She watched the stars blink forth and stare; she
saw the gradual darkening of the world, and then Halkett's moving shape
came towards her. Out here, he was in his proper place: the kitchen made
him clumsy, but wide places set him off, and she felt a kind of pride in
his quickness and his strength.

"George," she said softly as he would have passed her, and he swung
round and bent and took her in his arms, without hesitation or mistake.

"Were you waiting for me?" he whispered, and felt her nod against his
coat. She freed herself very gently. "Shall we stay out here?" he said.

"No. I have left Notya long enough."

"What made you wait for me?"

"I--don't know," she said. She had not asked herself the question, and
now the unspoken answer shocked her with its significance. She had gone
to wait for him without any thought. It might have been the night that
drew her out, but she knew it was not that. Once before, she had called
herself a slave, and so she labelled herself again, but now she did it
tremulously, without fierceness, aware that it was her own nature to
which she was chiefly bound.

"Are you going to wait for me every night?" she heard him say. "Give me
your hand, Helen. It is so small. Will you go over the wall or through
the door? I'd like to lift you over."

"No. I want to go through the garden. There are primroses there. Big
ones, like stars."

"It's you that are a star."

"I think they liked the snow. And the poplars are all buds. I wish I
could sit in the tree-tops and look right across the moor."

"And wait for me. And when I came I'd hold my arms out and you'd jump
into them."

"If I didn't fly away."

"Ay, I expect you would do that."

They did not speak again until they reached the house, and when she had
lighted the kitchen lamp she saw him looking moodily into the fire.

"Is Mrs. Biggs better?" she asked smoothly.

"What do you know about her?