She refused to leave the house until the last cart had gone down the road at which Helen must no longer look in hope. She watched the slow departure of the cart and held to the garden gate, rubbing it with her hands. She looked up at the long house with its wise, unblinking eyes. She had to leave it: George was waiting for her at the farm, but the house was like a part of her, and she was not complete when she turned away from it.
There was daylight on the moor, but when she dipped into the larch-wood she found it was already night, and night lay on the cobbled courtyard, on the farmhouse, and on George, who waited in the doorway.
"You're like you were before," he said. "A silver star coming through the trees—coming to me." He took her hand. "I don't know why you do it," he murmured, and led her in.
They slept in a room papered with a pattern of roses and furnished with a great fourposted bed. It was the room in which George Halkett and his father had been born, the best bedroom for many generations. The china on the heavy washstand had pink roses on it, too, and the house was fragrant with real roses, burning wood, clean, scented linen. Jasmine grew round the window and nodded in.
"Are you going to be happy?" George asked her, when the warm darkness dropped on them like another coverlet, and she hardly knew that it was she who reassured him. Could it be Helen Caniper in this room with the low ceiling and farmhouse smells, this bridal chamber of the Halketts? Helen Caniper seemed to have disappeared.
She woke when she had been asleep for a little while, and at first she could not remember where she was; then the window darted out of the darkness and the furniture took on shapes. She looked up and saw the looming canopy of the bed, she heard George breathing beside her, and suddenly she felt suffocated by the draperies and the low ceiling and the remembrance of the big pink roses growing on the wall.
She slid to the edge of the bed and out of it. The carpet was harsh to her feet, but, by the window, the bare boards soothed them.
There were dark clouds floating against the sky, and the larches looked like another cloud dropped down until she saw their crests, spear-like and piercing: they hid the moor in its livery of night.
She turned her head and listened to the sleeper, who did not stir except to breathe. She wanted to see her moor and the house where the Pinderwells were walking and wondering at its emptiness. George would not hear her if she dressed and left the room, and, having done so, she stood outside the door and listened before she fumbled her way along the passages.
She sped through the larches, but when her feet touched the heather they went more slowly, and now it was she who might have been a cloud, trailing across the moor. So she went until she saw the house, and then she ran towards it, startling the rabbits, hearing the blur of wings, and feeling the ping or flutter of insects against her face.