He wandered toward the wood on foot, taking the letter with him. He must reply, and soon. But he did not know exactly what he would say.

Helen had managed to slip away for the afternoon. Mama and the girls were going on a round of visits, mainly to boast of the news that they were to entertain Mr. Mainwaring for dinner, she suspected. It had not been difficult to avoid being made a member of the party. It was becoming an accepted fact that she did not participate with any regularity in the afternoon social rituals of the neighborhood. She rather believed that her own family welcomed her absence. She did not offer much support in the conversations anyway.

She had already shed her riding habit and was dressed in the shabby old cotton dress again. One day soon, she knew, the garment was going to fail to pieces around her and she would have to find something else to wear when she wished to be totally comfortable and free. But she hated to think of its happening. She had worn the dress since she was in the schoolroom, first as a day dress, and later when it became too short for her, as a painting smock to save her good dress from the splatters of paint that were inevitable when she began work.

She intended painting that afternoon. But painting for Helen did not necessarily mean dragging out easel, paper, and paints and setting to work to produce a picture. Sometimes it could mean doing nothing for a whole afternoon but observing. And that was the case on this particular afternoon. She had decided to paint the stream. But having set herself that task, she realized that she had never really seen it at all. It would have been easy ten years before or even more recently than that. Children always took for granted that water was blue. Her brightest blue paint would have been pulled out and in no time at all she would have had a satisfactory blue streak across the paper.