" she said sleepily.

"I'll never understand you."

"Yes, you will. I'm very simple, and now I'm half asleep."

"Shall I carry you upstairs?"

She shook her head.

"Helen, come to my house. Bring Mrs. Caniper. I want you. And the whole
moor's talking about the way we live."

"Oh, let the moor talk! Don't you love to hear it? It's the voice I love
best. I shan't like living in your house while this one stands."

"But you'll have to."

She put up a finger. "I didn't say I wouldn't. Will you never learn to
trust me?"

"I am learning," he said.

"And you must be patient. Most people are engaged before they marry. You
married me at once."

"Hush!" he said. "I don't like thinking about that."

After this confession, her mind crept a step forward, and she dared to
look towards a time when Mildred Caniper would be dead and she at
Halkett's Farm. The larch-lined hollow would half suffocate her, she
believed, but she would grow accustomed to its closeness as she would
grow used to George and George to her. Soon he would completely trust
her. He would learn to ask her counsel, and, at night, she would sit and
sew and listen to his talk of crops and cattle, and the doings and
misdoings of his men. He would have no more shyness of her, but
sometimes she would startle him into a memory of how he had wooed her in
the kitchen and seen her as a star. And she would have children: not
those shining ones who were to have lived in the beautiful bare house
with her and Zebedee, but sturdy creatures with George's mark on them.
She would become middle-aged and lose her slenderness, and half forget
she had ever been Helen Caniper; yet George and the children would
always be a little strange to her, and only when she was alone and on
the moor would she renew her sense of self and be afraid of it.

The prospect did not daunt her, for she had faith in her capacity to
bear anything except the love of Zebedee for another woman. She ignored
her selfishness towards him because the need to keep him was as strong
as any other instinct: he was hers, and she had the right to make him
suffer, and, though she honestly tried to shut her thoughts against him,
when she did think of him it was to own him, to feel a dangerous joy in
the memory of his thin face and tightened lips.

On the moor, harvests were always late, and George was gathering hay in
August when richer country was ready to deliver up its corn, and one
afternoon when he was car