esh and innocent--"

"So that's what he thinks of me!"

"Hush! I like this," Helen said.

"Even if there were a stern stepmother in the background, you'd be
envious of that girl. You might obey no laws, but you'd find yourself
the slave of something, your own vice, perhaps, or folly, or the will of
that gentleman tramp of yours." He ended with a sharp tap of his
emptied pipe, and sank back in a thoughtful silence.

Helen's hands slid down her stockings from knee to ankle and back again:
her eyes were on the fire, but they saw the wet high road and the ragged
woman with skirt flapping against shapeless boots. The storm's voice
rose and fell, and sometimes nothing could be heard but the howling of
the wind, and she knew that the poplars were bent under it; but when it
rested for a moment the steady falling of the rain had a kind of
reassurance. In the room, there were small sounds of shifting coals and
breathing people.

Miriam sat on her stool like a bird on a branch. Her head was on one
side, the tilted eyebrows gave her face an enquiring look, and she
smiled with a light mischief. "You ought to have been a preacher, John
dear," she said. "And you took--they always do--rather an unfair case."

"Take any case you like, you can't get freedom. When you're older you
won't want it."

"You're very young, John, to have found that out," Helen said.

"But you know it."

Miriam clapped her hands in warning. "Don't say," she begged, "that it's
because you are a woman!"

"Is that the reason?" Helen asked.

"No, it's because you are a Helen, a silly, a slave! And John makes
himself believe it because he's in love with a woman who is going to
manage him. Clever me!"

Colour was in John's cheeks. "Clever enough," he said, "but an awful
little fool. Let's do something."

"When I have been sitting still for a long time," Helen said, as though
she produced wisdom, "I'm afraid to move in case something springs on
me. I get stiff-necked. I feel--I feel that we're lost children with no
one to take care of us."

"I'm rather glad I'm not that tramp," Miriam owned, and shivered.

"And I do wish Notya were safe at home."

"I don't," said Miriam stubbornly.

The wind whistled with a shrill note like a call, and upstairs a door
banged loudly.

"Which room?" Miriam whispered.

"Hers, I think. We left the windows open," John said in a sensible loud
voice. "I'll go and shut them."

"Don't go. I won't be left here!" Miriam