The noise of the street rushed on her again, and she heard the shopman say, "That's a case, I think. I've seen that couple about before. Time he was married, too."
Slowly Helen turned a head, which felt stiff and swollen, to look at the person who could say so. She restrained a desire to hold it, and, stepping to the threshold of the shop, she called into the depths that she would soon return.
Without any attempt at secrecy she followed that pair absorbed in one another. She went because there was no choice, she was impelled by her necessity to know and unhindered by any scruples, and when she had seen the two pass down the quiet road leading to his house, with his hand on her elbow and her face turned to his, Helen went back to the young man and the bales of cloth.
She chose the corduroy and left the shop, and it was not long before she found herself outside the town, but she could remember nothing of her passage. She came to a standstill where the moor road stretched before her, and there she suffered realization to fall on her with the weight of many waters. She cried out under the shock, and, turning, she ran without stopping until she came to Zebedee's door.
An astonished maid tried not to stare at this flushed and elegant lady.
"The doctor is engaged, miss," she said.
"I shall wait. Please tell him that I must see him."
"What name shall I say?"
"Miss Caniper. Miss Helen Caniper." She had no memory of any other.
She sat on one of the hard leather chairs and looked at a fern that died reluctantly in the middle of the table. Her eyes burned and would not be eased by tears, her heart leapt erratically in her breast, yet the one grievance of which she was exactly conscious was that Zebedee had a new servant and had not told her. If she had to have her tinker, surely Zebedee might have kept Eliza. She was invaded by a cruel feeling of his injustice; but her thoughts grew vague as she sat there, and her dry lips parted and closed, as though they tried to frame words and could not. For what seemed a long, long time, she could hear the sound of voices through the wall: then the study door was opened, a girl laughed, Zebedee spoke; another door was opened, there were steps on the path and the gate clicked. She sat motionless, still staring at the fern, but when Zebedee entered she looked up at him and spoke.