ich sat like
an imposition on her; "we cannot always do as we wish."

"Oh, I know that," Helen said. She put on a pair of gloves, armed
herself with brooms and dusters, and left the room.

It seemed to her that people wilfully complicated life. She put a just
value on the restraint which had been a great part of her training, but
a pretence which had the transparency of its weakness moved her to a
patient kind of scorn, and in that moment she had a flash of insight
which showed her that she had sometimes failed to understand her
stepmother because she had not suspected the variability of the elder
woman's character. Mildred Caniper produced an impression of strength in
which she herself did not believe; she had imprisoned her impulses in
coldness, and they only escaped in the sharp utterances of her tongue;
she was uncertain of her power, and she insisted on its acceptance.

"And she's miserable, miserable," Helen's heart cried out, and she
laughed unhappily herself. "And Miriam's afraid of her! There's nothing
to be afraid of. She knows that, and she's afraid we'll find it out all
the time. And it might all have been so simple and so--so smooth."

Helen was considered by the other Canipers and herself as the dullest of
the family, and this morning she swept, dusted and polished in the old
ignorance of her acuteness, nor would the knowledge of it have consoled
her. She was puzzling over the cause which kept the man in Italy apart
from the woman here, and when she gave that up in weariness, she tried
to picture him in a white house beside an eternally blue sea. The
windows of the house had jalousies of a purplish red, there were
palm-trees in the sloping garden and, at the foot of it, waves rocked a
shallow, tethered boat. And her father was in bed, no doubt; the flush
redder on his thin cheeks, his pointed black beard jerked over the
sheet. She had seen him lying so on his last visit to the moor, and she
had an important little feeling of triumph in the memory of that
familiarity. She was not sentimental about this distant parent, for he
was less real than old Halkett, far less real than Mr. Pinderwell; yet
it seemed cruel that he should lie in that warm southern country without
a wife or daughter to care for him.

"Helen," Miriam said from Phoebe's door, "do you think he is going to
die?"

"How can I tell?"

"And you don't care?"

"Not much, of course, but I'm sorry for him."

"Sweet thing! And if he dies, s