Going across the moor, she cried feebly. She wished old Halkett had not been lying on the red sofa. He should have died in the big kitchen of his fathers, or upstairs in a great bed, not in that commonly-furnished little sitting-room where the work-basket of Mrs. Biggs kept company with a cheap china lamp and photographs in frames. She wondered how they would manage to undress him, and for how long Mrs. Biggs would sit beside him like a fate, a fate in a red blouse and a brown skirt. Perhaps even now they were pulling off his clothes. Terrible for George to have to do that, she thought, yet it seemed natural enough work for Mrs. Biggs, with her hard mouth and cold eyes, and no doubt she had often put him to bed in the lusty days of his carousals. Perhaps the dead could really see from under their stiff eyelids, and old Halkett would laugh at the difficulty with which they disrobed him for this last time. Perhaps he had been watching when George and she looked through the window. Until now she had never seen him when he did not leer at her, and she felt that he must still be leering under the mask of death. The taint of what she had looked on hung heavily about her, and the fresh air of the moor could not clear it away. Crying still, in little whimpers which consoled her, she stole through the garden and the house to the beautiful solitude of Phoebe's room and the cleanliness of linen sheets. Supperless she lay there, by turn welcoming and rejecting the pictures which appeared on the dark wall of her mind, and when Helen knocked on the door she was not bidden to enter. "Don't you want anything to eat?" she called. "No." "What's the matter?" "I--feel sick." "Then mayn't I come in and look after you?" Helen asked in a voice which impelled Miriam to bark an angry negative. It was Helen, who liked to help people, to whom this thing should have happened, yet Miriam possessed her experience jealously; it had broken into the monotony of life and to that extent she was grateful. "And I must be very kind to George," she decided before she went to sleep. She dropped her white eyelids the next morning when John gave the news of the old man's death, for she did not want to betray her knowledge. "Oh!" Helen said, and Rupert remarked lightly and watchfully that Zebedee would now be less often on the moor. "There's still the funeral," Helen said oddly. "And let's hope they'll bury him soon," John added, and so finished with old Halkett. Helen was still thoughtful. "Perhaps we ought to go and be nice to George. There won't be anything we can do, but we might ask him if there is." "The less you have to do with George--" John began, and Miriam interrupted him, clicking her tongue. "Helen, Helen, haven't you heard about George and Lily Brent? A dreadful story. Ask John." "If you're not careful," he said menacingly, "I'll do what she did to him." "No, no, you won't, Johnny; for, in spite of everything, you're a little gentleman."