"I must have done it very well."
"Miriam didn't like it. She thought it silly."
"So it is."
"No, it's real, so real that he has been sitting in our hollow," she complained.
"That won't do. Turn him out. He doesn't belong to our moor."
"No. I think I'll go for a walk and forget him."
"I should," he said, in his sympathetic way. "I won't go to bed till you come back." He pulled his chair nearer to the lamp, opened a book and contentedly heard Helen leave the house, for though he was fond of her there were times when her forebodings and her conscience became wearisome. Let the moor be her confessor tonight!
Helen dropped into the darkness like a swimmer taking deep water quietly and at once she was immersed in happiness. She forgot her stepmother sitting so stiffly on the sofa and for a little while she forgot that the future which held her and Zebedee in its embrace held a solitary Mildred Caniper less warmly. In the scented night, Helen allowed herself to taste joy without misgiving.
She walked slowly because she was hemmed in by feelings which were blissful and undefined: she knew only that the world smelt sweeter than it had ever done, that the stars shone with amazing brightness. Through the darkness she could see the splendid curves of the moor and the shapes of thorn bushes thick with leaves. The familiar friends of other days seemed to wait upon her happiness, but the stars laughed at her as they had always done. She looked up and saw a host of them, clear and distant, shining in a sky so blue and vast that to see it was like flight. They were secure in their high places, and with the smiling benignity of gods they assured her of her littleness, and gladly she accepted that assurance, for she shared her littleness with Zebedee, and now she understood that her happiness was made of small great things, of the hope of caring for him, of keeping that shining house in order, of cradling children in wide, airy rooms. She had a sudden desire to mend Zebedee's clothes and put them neatly in their places, to feel the smoothness of his freshly-laundered collars in her hand.
She sat down in the heather and it was her turn to laugh up at the stars who could do none of these things and lived in isolated grandeur. The earth was nearer to her finite mind. It was warm with the sunshine of many days and trodden by human, beloved feet; it offered up food and drink and consolation. Darker than the sky, it had no colour but its own, yet Helen sat among pale spikes of blossom.