Helen, her blood icing over, realized that unless she freed herself very quickly now, she would be fighting against a strong, aroused young man not clearly aware of what he was doing. She took refuge in the sharp maternal note of ten years ago, almost vanished in the closer, more equal companionship of the time between: "No, Robin. Stop it, at once, do you hear?" Automatically he let her go, and she rolled quickly away, out of his reach, and got to her feet. Robin, too intelligent to be unaware of her anger and too naive to know its cause, suddenly dropped his head and wept, wholly unstrung. "Why are you angry?" he blurted out. "I was only loving you." And at the phrase of the five-year-old child, Helen felt her throat would burst with its ache. She managed to choke out, "I'm not angry, Robin--we'll talk about this later, I promise--" and then, her own control vanishing, turned and fled precipitately into the pouring rain. She plunged through the familiar woods for a long time, in a daze of unthinking misery. She did not even fully realize that she was sobbing and muttering aloud, "No, no, no, no--" She must have wandered for several hours. The rain had stopped and the darkness was lifting before she began to grow calmer and to think more clearly. She had been blind, not to foresee this day when Robin was a child; only if her child had been a daughter could it have been avoided. Or--she was shocked at the hysterical sound of her own laughter--if Colin had stayed and they had raised a family like Adam and Eve! But what now? Robin was sixteen; she was not yet forty. Helen caught at vanishing memories of society; taboos so deeply rooted that for Helen they were instinctual and impregnable. Yet for Robin nothing existed except this little patch of forest and Helen herself--the only person in his world, more specifically at the moment the only woman in his world. _So much_, she thought bitterly, _for instinct. But have I the right to begin this all over again? Worse; have I the right to deny its existence and when I die, leave Robin alone?_ She had stumbled and paused for breath, realizing that she had wandered in circles and that she was at a familiar point on the river bank which she had avoided for sixteen years. On the heels of this realization she became aware that for only the second time in memory, the winds were wholly stilled. * * * * * Her eyes, swollen with crying, ached as she tried to pierce the gloom of the mist, lilac-tinted with the approaching sunrise, which hung around the water. Through the dispersing mist she made out, dimly, the form of a man.