She watched him heavily cross the foot-bridge to the other side of the river.  Her quick pity went with him, for she herself knew well what it meant to be solitary and neglected.  He seldom sold a picture, and nobody knew what he lived on.  The few lessons he had given Helena had been as a golden gleam in a very grey day.  But alack, Helena had soon tired of her lessons, as she had tired of the mile of coveted trout-fishing that Mr. Evans of the farm beyond the oak-wood had pressed upon her—­or of the books the young Welsh-speaking curate of the little mountain church near by was so eager to lend her.  Through and behind a much gentler manner, the girl’s familiar self was to be felt—­by Lucy at least—­as clearly as before.  She was neither to be held nor bound.  Attempt to lay any fetter upon her—­of hours, or habit—­and she was gone; into the heart of the mountains where no one could follow her.  Lucy would often compare with it the eager docility of those last weeks at Beechmark.

* * * * *

Helena’s walk had taken her through the dripping oak-wood and over the crest of the hill to a ravine beyond, where the river, swollen now by the abundant rains which had made an end of weeks of drought, ran, noisily full, between two steep banks of mossy crag.  From the crag, oaks hung over the water, at fantastic angles, holding on, as it seemed, by one foot and springing from the rock itself; while delicate rock plants, and fern fringed every ledge down to the water.  A seat on the twisted roots of an overhanging oak, from which, to either side, a little green path, as though marked for pacing, ran along the stream, was one of her favourite haunts.  From up-stream a mountain peak now kerchiefed in wisps of sunlit cloud peered in upon her.  Above it, a lake of purest blue from which the wind, which had brought them, was now chasing the clouds; and everywhere the glory of the returning sun, striking the oaks to gold, and flinging a chequer of light on the green floor of the wood.

Helena sat down to wait for Peter, who would be sure to find her wherever she hid herself.  This spot was dear to her, as those places where life has consciously grown to a nobler stature are dear to men and women.  It was here that within twenty-four hours of her last words with Philip Buntingford, she had sat wrestling with something which threatened vital forces in her that her will consciously, desperately, set itself to maintain.  Through her whole ripened being, the passion of that inner debate was still echoing; though she knew that the fight was really won.  It had run something like this: 

“Why am I suffering like this?

“Because I am relaxed—­unstrung.  Why should I have everything I want—­when others go bare?  Philip went bare for years.  He endured—­and suffered.  Why not I?

“But it is worse for me—­who am young!  I have a right to give way to what I feel—­to feel it to the utmost.