never shall be any good. Look at those fingers—they're like bits of stick—beastly things!"
He thrust them out indignantly for her inspection. Laura looked at them with a professional air.
"I don't call it a bad hand. I expect you've no patience."
"Haven't I! I tell you I'd play all day, if it'ld do any good—but it won't."
"And how about the poor farm?" said Laura, with a lifted brow.
"Oh! the farm—the farm—dang the farm!"—said Mason violently, slapping his knee.
Suddenly there was a sound of voices outside, a clattering on the stones of the farmyard.
Mason sprang up, all frowns.
"That's mother. Here, let's shut the piano—quick! She can't abide it."
CHAPTER V
Mason went out to meet his mother, and Laura waited. She stood where she had risen, beside the piano, looking nervously towards the door. Childish remembrances and alarms seemed to be thronging back into her mind.
There was a noise of voices in the outer room. Then a handle was roughly turned, and Laura saw before her a short, stout woman, with grey hair, and the most piercing black eyes. Intimidated by the eyes, and by the sudden pause of the newcomer on the threshold, Miss Fountain could only look at her interrogatively.
"Is it Cousin Elizabeth?" she said, holding out a wavering hand.
Mrs. Mason scarcely allowed her own to be touched.
"We're not used to visitors i' church-time," she said abruptly, in a deep funereal voice. "Mappen you'll sit down."
And still holding the girl with her eyes, she walked across to an old rocking-chair, let herself fall into it, and with a loud sigh loosened her bonnet strings.
Laura, in her amazement, had to strangle a violent inclination to laugh. Then she flushed brightly, and sat down on the wooden stool in front of the piano. Mrs. Mason, still staring at her, seemed to wait for her to speak. But Laura would say nothing.
"Soa—thoo art Stephen Fountain's dowter—art tha?"
"Yes—and you have seen me before," was the girl's quiet reply.
She said to herself that her cousin had the eyes of a bird of prey. So black and fierce they were, in the greyish white face under the shaggy hair. But she was not afraid. Rather she felt her own temper rising.
"How long is't sen your feyther deed?"
"Nine months. But you knew that, I think—because I wrote it you."
Mrs. Mason's heavy lids blinked a moment, then she said with slowly quickening emphasis, like one mounting to a crisis:
"Wat art tha doin' wi' Bannisdale Hall? What call has thy feyther's dowter to be visitin onder Alan Helbeck's roof?"
Laura's open mouth showed first wonderment, then laughter.
"Oh! I see," she said impatiently—"you don't seem to understand. But of course you remember that my father married Miss Helbeck for his second wife?"
"Aye, an she cam oot fra amang them," exclaimed Mrs. Mason; "she put away from her the accursed thing!"
The massive face was all aglow, transformed, with a kind of sombre fire. Laura stared afresh.
"She gave up being a Catholic, if that's what you mean," she said after a moment's pause. "But she couldn't keep to it. When papa fell ill, and she was unhappy, she went back. And then of course she made it up with her brother."
The triumph in Mrs. Mason's face yielded first to astonishment, then to anger.
"The poor weak doited thing," she said at last in a tone of indescribable contempt, "the poor silly fule! But naebody need ha' luked for onything betther from a Helbeck.—And I daur say"—she lifted her voice fiercely—"I daur say she took yo' wi' her, an it's along o' thattens as yo're coom to spy on us oop here?"
Laura sprang up.
"Me!" she said indignantly. "You think I'm a Catholic and a spy? How kind of you! But of course you don't know anything about my father, nor how he brought me up. As for my poor little stepmother, I came here with her to get her well, and I shall stay with her till she is well. I really don't know why you talk to me like this. I suppose you have cause to dislike Mr. Helbeck, but it is very odd that you should visit it on me, papa's daughter, when I come to see you!"
The girl's voice trembled, but she threw back her slender neck with a gesture that became her. The door, which had been closed, stealthily opened. Hubert Mason's face appeared in the doorway. It was gazing eagerly—admiringly—at Miss Fountain.
Mrs. Mason did not see him. Nor was she daunted by Laura's anger.
"It's aw yan," she said stubbornly. "Thoo ha' made a covenant wi' the Amorite an the Amalekite. They ha' called tha, an thoo art eatin o' their sacrifices!"
There was an uneasy laugh from the door, and Laura, turning her astonished eyes in that direction, perceived Hubert standing in the doorway, and behind him another head thrust eagerly forward—the head of a young woman in a much betrimmed Sunday hat.
"I say, mother, let her be, wil tha?" said a hearty voice; and, pushing Hubert aside, the owner of the hat entered the room. She went up to Laura, and gave her a loud kiss.
"I'm Polly—Polly Mason. An I know who you are weel enough. Doan't you pay ony attention to mother. That's her way. Hubert an I take it very kind of you to come and see us."
"Mother's rats on Amorites!" said Hubert, grinning.
"Rats?—Amorites?"—said Laura, looking piteously at Polly, whose hand she held.
Polly laughed, a bouncing, good-humoured laugh. She herself was a bouncing, good-humoured person, the apparent antithesis of her mother with her lively eyes, her frizzled hair, her high cheek-bones touched with a bright pink.
"Yo'll have to get oop early to understan' them two," she declared. "Mother's allus talkin out o' t' Bible, an Hubert picks up a lot o' low words out o' Whinthrupp streets—an there 'tis. But now look here—yo'll stay an tak' a bit o' dinner with us?"
"I don't want to be in your way," said Laura formally. Really, she had some difficulty to control the quiver of her lips, though it would have been difficult to say whether laughter or tears came nearest.
At this Polly broke out in voluble protestations, investigating her cousin's dress all the time, fingering her little watch-chain, and even taking up a corner of the pretty cloth jacket that she might examine the quality of it. Laura, however, looked at Mrs. Mason.
"If Cousin Elizabeth wishes me to stay," she said proudly.
Polly burst into another loud laugh.
"Yo see, it goes agen
