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Updated: June 9, 2025
"No, I think we ought to say how-d'you-do, here, and then pass him on to Notya in the drawing-room." "Very good. Stand firm. But they'll be hours rolling up the track. What the devil do we want with an uncle? The last time we stood like this was when our revered father paid us a call. Five years ago six?" "Six." "H'm. If I ever have any children Where's Miriam?
Notya looked as though she could not rouse her energies to active disapproval; as though she would never say her rare, amusing things again, and Miriam was reminded of the turnip lanterns they had made in their youth hollowness and flickering light within. The succeeding days encouraged that reminder, for something had gone from Mildred Caniper and left her stubbornly frail in mind and body.
Intensely interested in a Notya moved to some sign of an emotion which was not annoyance, Miriam stood in the doorway and took care to make no movement which might betray her; but Helen stared at the fire and suffered the pain she had always felt for her stepmother's distresses.
"Yes, really; but this is pretending," Rupert said. "It's not pretending. It's true," Miriam said, and she went on with the game though she had to play alone. At the age of twenty she still played it: Notya was still the cruel stepmother and Miriam's eyes were eager on a horizon against which the rescuer should stand.
"She was all right yesterday." "You'll have to see her tomorrow. Then you'll come here, too." "There isn't any need." "But Notya likes to see you. Come and see her now." She sighed when they walked downstairs together as though things had never changed. "Oh, Zebedee, I wanted you to come today. You have made me feel clean again. Notya oh !" She shuddered.
If she stayed there, she would be spared the trouble of going to bed and getting up again, and when Helen called once more, she heard the voice as from a great way off, and answered sleepily, "Yes, I'm coming," but the next minute she was annoyed to find Helen standing over her. "Why didn't you come in? It's Notya. She has put lights in every room. She was afraid of the dark, she says.
"Now I must go back and see how Notya is." "No. I want to show you the side saddle." "Which?" "The one for you." Adventure was hovering again. "For me? Are you really going to teach me to ride?" "Didn't I say so?" "But when?" "When the rest of the world's in their beds." "Oh. Won't it be too dark?" "We'll manage. We'll try it first in daylight, right over the moor where no one goes.
"But Rupert will be here," Helen said quickly. "He'll marry, too, and you'll be left with Notya. Somebody will have to look after her old age. And as you've always been so fond of her !" "There would be the moor," Helen said, answering all her unspoken thoughts. "It wouldn't comfort me!" "Don't worry, my dear," John said kindly; "the gods are surely tender with the good."
"Notya mother," he echoed amiably, and so Mildred Caniper received her name. As he grew older, he wondered if he really remembered this occasion or whether Notya herself had told him of it, but he knew that the house and the garden wall and the nursery were true.
But she did not intend to forgive Mildred Caniper for a single injury, and even now that she was almost woman she refused her own responsibility. Notya had arranged her life, and the evil of it, at least, should be laid at Notya's door.
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