"She was my friend. She was beautiful. You are all like her. Miriam and Rupert—" The voice dropped like a stone falling into a well without a bottom, and Helen, listening for the sound of it, seemed to hear only the echoes of Mildred Caniper's memory, coming fainter and fainter from the past where the other woman made a gleam.
"Miriam—" she began again. "I haven't seen her."
"No. Uncle Alfred has taken her away."
"Ah!" Mildred said, and there was a silence.
After a time, her voice came back, thin and vague, a ghostly voice, speaking the thoughts of a mind that had lost its vigour.
"Alfred was in love with Edith. They all were. She was so pretty and so gay. But she was not unfaithful. No. I knew that. She told me and she trusted me, but I said nothing. That's what has worried me—all the time." Heavily she sighed again, and Helen drew herself to a sitting posture in her bed. She dared not ask the questions which tramped over each other in her mind; she hardly drew a breath lest the sound should change the current of the other's thought.
"She did silly things. They vexed me. I was jealous, I suppose. Take care of Miriam. Oh—but she's gone. Edith—she made men love her, and she couldn't help it, and then one night—but it's too long to tell. Philip thought she wasn't faithful, but I knew. She wouldn't tell him. She was angry, she wouldn't say a word, but she trusted me to tell him. And you see, I—didn't. He wouldn't go and see her. If he had seen her he would have found out. And soon she died—of measles." The woman in the bed laughed softly.
"That was so foolish! And then I married him. I got w-what I wanted. But there's a verse about leanness in the soul, isn't there? That's what I had. He wanted some one to look after the children, and I looked after you—no more. The struggling hasn't been worth while."
"No." The word came from Helen like a lost puff of wind.
"And then Philip went away, and I came here. That's all. I wanted to tell somebody. Now perhaps I can have peace. I meant to tell him, too, but I was too late. That worried me. All these years—"