"Oh! here's Uncle Alfred."
"And we learnt to swim."
"Yes. Good-bye. Kiss me again."
Helen stood quite still with her hands by her sides, while the carriage bumped over the track, stopped on the road that John and Lily might say their farewells, and slowly went on again until it was out of sight and she saw the road left empty. It looked callous, too, as though it did not care what came or went on it, and as she looked about her, Helen discovered that she was in a desert world, a wilderness of wind and dead, rustling heather and angry laurel leaves, of empty houses and women whose breath whistled through their distorted mouths. And the giants, standing so great and black against the sky, were less to guard her than to keep a friend from attempted rescue.
She raised her arms and opened her hands in a gesture of avowal. No one would ever rescue her, for, by her own act, she would be chained more firmly than Andromeda when Zebedee next came up the road.
"I must get it over," she whispered quickly, and she sat down where she had stood. She had to keep her promise, and now that there was no one in the way, the thing must be done before Zebedee could come and fight for her, lest people should be hurt and precious things broken: her word, and peace, and the beauty of the moor. Yet things were broken already: life limped; it would never go quite smoothly again.
She wondered what God was doing in His own place; it seemed that He had too much to do, or had He been careless at the beginning of things and let them get out of hand? She was sorry for Him. It must be dreary to look down on His work and see it going wrong. He was probably looking at her now and clicking His tongue in vexation. "There's Helen Caniper. She ought to have married the doctor. That's what I meant her to do. What's gone wrong? Miriam? I ought to have watched her. Dear, dear, dear! I oughtn't to have set them going at all if I couldn't keep them straight." So her thoughts ran as she sat with her head bowed to her knees, but she remembered how, in George's room that night, with Miriam on the floor, she had called to God without premeditation, with the naturalness of any cry for help, and in a fashion, He had heard her. No one had taught her to pray and until then she had called on no god but the one behind the smoke. Perhaps this other one had a power which she could not understand.
She looked up, and saw a sky miraculously arched and stretching beyond sight and imagination, and she thought, simply enough, that, having made the sky, God might be tired. And surely He had proved Himself: a being who had created this did not make small mistakes with men. It was some human creature who had failed, and though it seemed like Miriam, might it not be herself? Or Mildred Caniper, or some cause beyond Mildred Caniper, going back and back, like the waves of the sea? It was impossible to fix the blame, foolish to try, unnecessary to know it. The thing had happened: it might be good, yet when she heard Halkett's voice behind her, she was only conscious of bitter evil.
"I want to talk to you," he said.
"Yes?"