With an air of helpless annoyance May arose. “Well,” she said, “I promised him I wouldn’t tell the name of the man he was going to murder or nothing about it and I won’t. I’ve told you too much as it is but you gave me your word you wouldn’t tell. It’s got to be a secret between us.” She started off along the sidewalk toward the Edgley house and then turned and ran back to the new girl, who had got almost to her own gate. “You keep still,” May whispered dramatically. “If you go talking now remember you may get a man hung.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III A NEW life began to unfold itself to May Edgley. After the affair in the berry field, and until the time of the conversation with Maud Welliver, she had felt as one dead. As she went about in the Edgley household, doing the daily work, she sometimes stopped and stood still, on the stairs or in the kitchen by the stove. A whirlwind seemed to be going on around her while she stood thus, becalmed—fear made her body tremble. It had happened even in the moments when she was hidden under the elders by the creek. At such times the trunks of the willow trees and the fragrance of the elders comforted but did not comfort enough. There was something wanting. They were too impersonal, too sure of themselves. To herself, at such moments, May was like one sealed up in a vessel of glass. The light of days came to her and from all sides came the sound of life going on but she herself did not live. She but breathed, ate food, slept and awakened but what she wanted out of life seemed far away, lost to her. In a way, and ever since she had been conscious of herself, it had been so. She remembered faces she had seen, expressions that had come suddenly to peoples’ faces as she passed them on the streets. In particular old men had always been kind to her. They stopped to speak to her. “Hello, little girl,” they said. For her benefit eyes had been lifted, lips had smiled, kindly words had been spoken, and at such moments it had seemed to her that some tiny sluiceway out of the great stream of human life had been opened to her. The stream flowed on somewhere, in the distance, on the further side of a wall, behind a mountain of iron—just out of sight, out of hearing—but a few drops of the living waters of life had reached her, had bathed her. Understanding of the secret thing that went on within herself was not impossible. It could exist. In the days after the talk with Lillian the puzzled woman in the yellow house thought much about life. Her mind, naturally a busy active one, could not remain passive and for the time she dared not think much of herself and of her own future. She thought abstractly.