to the shaking
of her bed. She had no words with which to clothe her feelings, the
sense of her own smallness, of unhappiness so much the common lot that
it could almost pass unheeded. There was some comfort in the mingling of
her own misery with all that had been and was to be, but she felt
herself in the very presence of disintegration: the room was stirring
with fragments of the life which Mildred Caniper could not hold
together: mind and matter, they floated from the tired body in the
corner and came between Helen and the sleep that would have kept her
from thinking of the morrow, from her nightly vision of Zebedee's face
changing from that of happy lover to poor, stricken man. Turning in the
bed, she left him for the past of which Mildred Caniper had told her,
yet that past, as parent of the present, looked anxiously and not
without malice towards its grandchildren. What further tragedy would the
present procreate?

Answers to that question were still trooping past Helen when dawn came
through the windows, and some of them had the faces of children born to
an unwilling mother. Her mind cried out in protest: she could not be
held responsible; and because she felt the pull of future generations
that might blame her, she released the past from any responsibility
towards herself. No, she would not be held responsible: she had bought
Miriam, and the price must be paid: she and Miriam and all mankind were
bound by shackles forged unskilfully long ago, and the moor,
understanding them, had warned her. She could remember no day when the
moor had not foretold her suffering.

CHAPTER XXXI

A person less simple than Helen would have readjusted her conception of
herself, her character and circumstances, in the light of her new
knowledge; but with the passionate assertion that she could not be held
altogether responsible for what her own children might have to suffer,
Helen had made her final personal comment. For a day, her thoughts
hovered about the distant drama of which Mildred Caniper was the
memento, like a dusty programme found when the play itself is half
forgotten, and Helen's love grew with her added pity; but more urgent
matters were knocking at her mind, and every morning, when she woke, two
facts had forced an entrance. She was nearer to Zebedee by a night, and
only the daylight separated her from George and what he might demand
and, outside, the moor was covered with thick snow, as cold as her own
min