After this confession, her mind crept a step forward, and she dared to look towards a time when Mildred Caniper would be dead and she at Halkett's Farm. The larch-lined hollow would half suffocate her, she believed, but she would grow accustomed to its closeness as she would grow used to George and George to her. Soon he would completely trust her. He would learn to ask her counsel, and, at night, she would sit and sew and listen to his talk of crops and cattle, and the doings and misdoings of his men. He would have no more shyness of her, but sometimes she would startle him into a memory of how he had wooed her in the kitchen and seen her as a star. And she would have children: not those shining ones who were to have lived in the beautiful bare house with her and Zebedee, but sturdy creatures with George's mark on them. She would become middle-aged and lose her slenderness, and half forget she had ever been Helen Caniper; yet George and the children would always be a little strange to her, and only when she was alone and on the moor would she renew her sense of self and be afraid of it.
The prospect did not daunt her, for she had faith in her capacity to bear anything except the love of Zebedee for another woman. She ignored her selfishness towards him because the need to keep him was as strong as any other instinct: he was hers, and she had the right to make him suffer, and, though she honestly tried to shut her thoughts against him, when she did think of him it was to own him, to feel a dangerous joy in the memory of his thin face and tightened lips.
On the moor, harvests were always late, and George was gathering hay in August when richer country was ready to deliver up its corn, and one afternoon when he was carting hay from the fields beyond the farm, Helen walked into the town, leaving Lily Brent in charge of Mildred Caniper.
Helen had seldom been into the town since the day when she had married George, and the wind, trying to force her back, had beaten the body that was of no more value to her. Things were better now, and she had avenged herself gaily on the god behind the smoke. He had heard few sounds of weeping and he had not driven her from the moor: he had merely lost a suppliant and changed a girl into a woman, and today, in her independence of fate, she would walk down the long road and plant a pleasant thought at every step, and she need not look at the square house which Zebedee had bought for her.
She had told George to meet her at the side road if he had any errands for her in the town, and though he had none, he was there before her. Watching her approach, he thought he had never seen her lovelier. She wore a dress and hat of Miriam's choosing, the one of cream colour and the other black, and the beauty of their simple lines added to the grace that could still awe him.
"You look—like a swan," he said.
"Oh, George, a horrid bird!" She came close and looked up, for she liked to see him puzzled and adoring.
"It's the way you walk—and the white. And that little black hat for a beak."
"Well, swan or not," she said, and laughed, "you think I look nice, don't you?"
"I should think I do!" He stepped back to gaze at her. "You must always have clothes like that. There's no need for you to make your own."