Supperless she lay there, by turn welcoming and rejecting the pictures which appeared on the dark wall of her mind, and when Helen knocked on the door she was not bidden to enter.
"Don't you want anything to eat?" she called.
"No."
"What's the matter?"
"I—feel sick."
"Then mayn't I come in and look after you?" Helen asked in a voice which impelled Miriam to bark an angry negative.
It was Helen, who liked to help people, to whom this thing should have happened, yet Miriam possessed her experience jealously; it had broken into the monotony of life and to that extent she was grateful.
"And I must be very kind to George," she decided before she went to sleep.
She dropped her white eyelids the next morning when John gave the news of the old man's death, for she did not want to betray her knowledge.
"Oh!" Helen said, and Rupert remarked lightly and watchfully that Zebedee would now be less often on the moor.