t grow up away from the light, she was pale. Her
oval face was like ivory, and her lips, instead of being scarlet, had
the tender red of apple-blossom, after the unfolding of the bright bud.
Her hair was black and smooth and heavy, and lay on either side of her
face like a starling's wings. Her eyes too were as black as midnight,
and sometimes like midnight they were deep and sightless. But when she
was neither working nor spinning she would steal away to the
millstones, and stand there watching and listening. And then there were
two stars in the midnight. She came away from those stolen times
powdered with flour. Her black hair and her brows and lashes, her old
blue gown, her rough hands and fair neck, and her white face--all that
was dark and pale in her was merged in a mist, and seen only through
the clinging dust of the millstones. She would try to wipe off all the
evidences of her secret occasions, but her father generally knew. Had
he known by nothing else, he need only have looked at her eyes before
they lost their starlight.

One day when she was seventeen years old there was a knock at the
mill-house door. Nobody ever knocked. Her father was the only man who
came in and went out. The mill stood solitary in those days. The face
of the country has since been changed by man and God, but at that time
there were no habitations in sight. At regular times the peasants
brought their grain and fetched their meal; but the miller kept his
daughter away from his custom. He never said why. Doubtless at the back
of his mind was the thought of losing what was useful to him. Most
parents have their ways of trying to keep their children; in some it is
this way, in others that; not many learn to keep them by letting them
go.

So when the knock came at the door, it was the strangest thing that had
ever happened in Helen's life. She ran to the door and stood with her
hand on the heavy wooden bar that fell across it into a great socket.
Her heart beat fast. Before we know a thing it is a thousand things.
Only one thing would be there when she lifted the bar. But as she stood
with her hand upon it, a host of presences hovered on the other side. A
knight in armor, a king in his gold crown, a god in the guise of a
beggar, an angel with a sword; a dragon even; a woman to be her friend;
her mother...a child...

"Would it be better not to open?" thought Helen. For then she would
never know. Yes, then she could run to her millstones an