Helena had asked Dr. Lavendar to keep David, out of abject fear of
William King. The doctor had granted her until Sunday to give him up
without explanations; if she had not done so then, he must, he said
doggedly, "tell." In sending the child to the Rectory she had not
given him up; she had only declared a truce. She had tied Dr. King's
hands and gained a breathing-space in which to decide what she must
do; but she used to watch the hill road every morning, with scared
eyes, lest he should stop on his way up to Benjamin Wright's to say
that the truce was over. David came running joyously home two or three
times, for more clothes, or to see the rabbits, or to hang about her
neck and tell her of his journey. Upon one of these occasions, he
mentioned casually that "Alice had gone travelling." Helena's heart
stood still; then beat suffocatingly in her throat while she drew the
story piecemeal from the child's lips.
"She said," David babbled, "that he didn't know you. An' she said--"
"And where was he--Mr. Pryor, all this time?" she demanded,
breathlessly. She opened and shut her hands, and drew in her breath,
wincing as if in physical pain; across all the days since that meeting
of the Innocents, she felt his anger flaying her for the contretemps.
It brought home to her, with an aching sense of finality the
completeness of the break between them. But it did more than that.
Even while she cringed with personal dismay, she was groping blindly
towards a deeper and diviner despair: Those two young creatures were
the cherubims at the east of the garden, bearing the sword that turned
every way! By the unsparing light of that flashing blade the two
sinners, standing outside, saw each other; but the one, at least,
began to see something else: the glory of the garden upon which,
thirteen years ago, she had turned her back! ...
Helena did not ask any more questions. David, lounging against her
knee, chattered on, ending with a candid and uncomplimentary reference
to Mr. Pryor; but she did not reprove him. When, having, as it were,
displayed his sling and his bag of pebbles, he was ready to run
joyously back to the other home, she kissed him silently and with a
strange new consciousness of the everlasting difference between them.
But that did not lessen her passionate determination that William King
should never steal him from her! Yet how could she defeat her enemy?
A week passed, and still undecided, she wrote to Dr. Lavendar asking
further hospitality for David: "I want to have him with me always, but
just now I am a little uncertain whether I can do so, because I am
going to leave Old Chester. I will come and ask you about it in a few
days."