"Helen!" she heard George say, and she turned to see Mildred Caniper on the threshold.
"I heard voices," she said, looking a little dazed, but standing with her old straightness. "Who is here? It's Helen! It's—Helen! Oh, Helen—you!" Her face hardened, and her voice was the one of Helen's childhood. "I am afraid I must ask for an explanation of this extraordinary conduct."
The words were hardly done before she fell heavily to the floor.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Mildred Caniper died two days afterwards, without opening her eyes. Day and night, Helen watched and wondered whether, behind that mask, the mind was moving to acquaintance with the truth. Between life and death, she imagined a grey land where things were naked, neither clothed in disguising garments nor in glory. It might be that, for the first time, Mildred saw herself, looked into her own life and all the lives she knew, and gained a wider knowledge for the next. Nevertheless, it was horrible to Helen that Mildred Caniper had finally shut her eyes on the scene that killed her, and, for her last impression, had one of falsity and licence. Helen prayed that it might be removed, and, as she kept watch that first night, she told her all. There might be a little cranny through which the words could go, and she longed for a look or touch of forgiveness and farewell. She loved this woman whom she had served, but there were to be no more messages between them, and Mildred Caniper died with no other sound than the lessening of the sighing breaths she drew.
Zebedee guessed the nature of the shock that killed her, but only George and Helen knew, and for them it was another bond; they saw each other now with the eyes of those who have looked together on something never to be spoken of and never to be forgotten. She liked to have him with her, and he was dumb with pity for her and with regrets. To Miriam, when she arrived, it was an astonishment to find them sitting in the schoolroom, hand in hand, so much absorbed in their common knowledge that they did not loose their grasp at her approach, but sat on like lost, bewildered children in a wood.
Wherever Helen went, he followed, clumsy but protective, peering at her anxiously as though he feared something terrible would happen to her, too.
"You don't mind, do you?" he asked her.
"What?"