ge with her advances and
retreats. Afterwards, she suffered from a black anger that she must
serve the man she did not love, a dull despair from the knowledge that,
while both lived, the tie would hold. Her mind tried, and failed, to
make nothing of it; by nature she was bound to him who took most from
her, and when George had played the husband, he left her destitute. That
Zebedee would always have the best of her had been her boast, but for a
time, there was nothing he could have. She was George Halkett's woman.
The day was fogged with memories of the night, yet through that fog she
looked for his return. She was glad when she heard his step outside and,
going to the kitchen door, felt herself lifted off her feet. She did not
try to analyze the strange mingling of willingness and shrinking that
made up her feeling for him, but she found mental safety in abandoning
herself to what must be, a primitive pleasure in the fact of being
possessed, a shameful happiness in submission.

Nevertheless, it was only in his presence that she lost her red sense of
shame, and though she still walked nobly, looked with clear eyes, and
carried a high head, she fancied herself bent by broken pride, blinded
and dusty-haired. Zebedee's books helped her to blot out that vision of
herself and the other of Mildred Caniper still sitting by the fire and
refusing the fulness of the sun. What she read amazed her with its
profundity and amused her with its inconclusiveness. She had an awed
pity for men whose lives were occupied in these endless questionings,
and while Mildred idly turned the pages of periodicals she once had
scorned, Helen frowned and bit her lips over the problems of the ages.

They gave her and Zebedee something impersonal to talk of when he came
on his weekly visit.

"It's no good telling me," she warned him firmly, "that my poplars are
not really there. I can feel them and see them and hear them--always
hear them. If they weren't there, they would be! If I exist, so do
they."

"Quite so. You're doing very well. I told you the medicine would turn to
food."

"It's not food. What is it that nasty people chew? Gum? Yes,
chewing-gum. It keeps me going. I mean--"

He helped her over that abyss. "It's a most improper name for wisdom."

"This isn't wisdom. Wisdom is just going on--and--keeping the world
clean."

"Then," he said slowly, "you may count among the sages."

They stood together by the schoolroom window and watche