The narrow street was thronged with people who were neither of the town nor of the country, and suffered the disabilities of the hybrid. There were few keen or beautiful faces, and if there were fine bodies they were hidden under clumsy clothes. Helen wanted to strip them all, and straighten them, and force them into health and comeliness, and though she would not have her moor peopled by them, she wished they might all have moors of their own. The young man was very slow. She could hear him struggling with bales of cloth and breathing heavily. It was much hotter here than on the moor, and she supposed that human beings could grow accustomed to any smell, but she stepped further towards the kerbstone and drew in what air the street could spare to her. Quite unconscious of her fairness against the dingy background, she watched the moving people and heard the talk of the two men near her. They spoke of the hay crop, the price of bacon, the mismanagement of the gas company, and the words fell among the footsteps of the passers-by, and the noise of wheels, and became one dull confusion of sound to her; but all sounds fainted and most sights grew misty when she saw Zebedee walking on the other side of the street, looking down as he went, but bending an ear to the girl beside him. Men and women flitted like shadows between him and Helen, but she saw plainly enough. Zebedee was interested: he nodded twice, looked at the girl and laughed, while she walked sideways in her eagerness. She was young and pretty: no one, Helen thought, had ever married her. The noise of the street rushed on her again, and she heard the shopman say, "That's a case, I think. I've seen that couple about before. Time he was married, too." Slowly Helen turned a head, which felt stiff and swollen, to look at the person who could say so. She restrained a desire to hold it, and, stepping to the threshold of the shop, she called into the depths that she would soon return. Without any attempt at secrecy she followed that pair absorbed in one another. She went because there was no choice, she was impelled by her necessity to know and unhindered by any scruples, and when she had seen the two pass down the quiet road leading to his house, with his hand on her elbow and her face turned to his, Helen went back to the young man and the bales of cloth. She chose the corduroy and left the shop, and it was not long before she found herself outside the town, but she could remember nothing of her passage. She came to a standstill where the moor road stretched before her, and there she suffered realization to fall on her with the weight of many waters. She cried out under the shock, and, turning, she ran without stopping until she came to Zebedee's door. An astonished maid tried not to stare at this flushed and elegant lady. "The doctor is engaged, miss," she said. "I shall wait. Please tell him that I must see him." "What name shall I say?"