another question at her host.
"Have you many neighbours, Mr. Helbeck?"
Her voice startled his look away from her.
"Not many," he said, hesitating. "And I know little of those there are."
"Indeed! Don't you like—society?"
He laughed with some embarrassment. "I don't get much of it," he said simply.
"Don't you? What a pity!—isn't it, Bruno? I like society dreadfully—dances, theatres, parties—all sorts of things. Or I did—once."
She paused and stared at Helbeck. He did not speak, however. She sat up very straight and pushed the dog from her. "By the way," she said, in a shrill voice, "there are my cousins, the Masons. How far are they?"
"About seven miles."
"Quite up in the mountains, isn't it?"
Helbeck assented.
"Oh! I shall go there at once, I shall go tomorrow," said the girl, with emphasis, resting her small chin lightly on the head of the dog, while she fixed her eyes—her hostile eyes—upon her host.
Helbeck made no answer. He went to fetch another log for the fire.
"Why doesn't he say something about them?" she thought angrily. "Why doesn't he say something about papa?—about his illness?—ask me any questions? He may have hated him, but it would be only decent. He is a very grand, imposing person, I suppose, with his melancholy airs, and his family. Papa was worth a hundred of him! Oh! past a quarter to ten? Time to go, and let him have his prayers to himself. Augustina told me ten."
She sprang up, and stiffly held out her hand.
"Good-night, Mr. Helbeck. I ought to go to Augustina and settle her for the night. To-morrow I should like to tell you what the doctor said about her; she is not strong at all. What time do you breakfast?"
"Half-past eight. But, of course——"
"Oh, no! of course Augustina won't come down! I will carry her up her tray myself. Good-night."
Helbeck touched her hand. But as she turned away, he followed her a few steps irresolutely, and then said: "Miss Fountain,"—she looked round in surprise—"I should like you to understand that everything that can be done in this poor house for my sister's comfort, and yours, I should wish done. My resources are not great, but my will is good."
He raised his eyelids, and she saw the eyes beneath, full, for the first time—eyes grey like her own, but far darker and profounder. She felt a momentary flutter, perhaps of compunction. Then she thanked him and went her way.
* * * * *
When she had made her stepmother comfortable for the night, Laura Fountain went back to her room, shielding her candle with difficulty from the gusts that seemed to tear along the dark passages of the old house. The March rawness made her shiver, and she looked shrinkingly into the gloom before her, as she paused outside her own door. There, at the end of the passage, lay the old tower; so Mrs. Denton had told her. The thought of all the locked and empty rooms in it—dark, cold spaces—haunted perhaps by strange sounds and presences of the past, seemed to let loose upon her all at once a little whirlwind of fear. She hurried into her room, and was just setting down her candle before turning to lock her door, when a sound from the distant hall caught her ear.
A deep monotonous sound, rising and falling at regular intervals, Mr. Helbeck reading prayers, with the two maids, who represented the only service of the house.
Laura lingered with her hand on the door. In the silence of the ancient house, there was something touching in the sound, a kind of appeal. But it was an appeal which, in the girl's mind, passed instantly into reaction. She locked the door, and turned away, breathing fast as though under some excitement.
The tears, long held down, were rising, and the room, where a large wood fire was burning—wood was the only provision of which there was a plenty at Bannisdale—seemed to her suddenly stifling. She went to the casement window and threw it open. A rush of mild wind came through, and with it, the roar of the swollen river.
The girl leant forward, bathing her hot face in the wild air. There was a dark mist of trees below her, trees tossed by the wind; then, far down, a ray of moonlight on water; beyond, a fell-side, clear a moment beneath a sky of sweeping cloud; and last of all, highest of all, amid the clouds, a dim radiance, intermittent and yet steady, like the radiance of moonlit snow.
A strange nobility and freedom breathed from the wide scene; from its mere depth below her; from the spacious curve of the river, the mountains half shown, half hidden, the great race of the clouds, the fresh beating of the wind. The north spoke to her and the mountains. It was like the rush of something passionate and straining through her girlish sense, intensifying all that was already there. What was this thirst, this yearning, this physical anguish of pity that crept back upon her in all the pauses of the day and night?
It was nine months since she had lost her father, but all the scenes of his last days were still so clear to her that it seemed to her often sheer incredibility that the room, the bed, the helpless form, the noise of the breathing, the clink of the medicine glasses, the tread of the doctor, the gasping words of the patient, were all alike fragments and phantoms of the past—that the house was empty, the bed sold, the patient gone. Oh! the clinging of the thin hand round her own, the piteousness of suffering—of failure! Poor, poor papa!—he would not say, even to comfort her, that they would meet again. He had not believed it, and so she must not.
No, and she would not! She raised her head fiercely and dried her tears. Only, why was she here, in the house of a man who had never spoken to her father—his brother-in-law—for thirteen years; who had made his sister feel that her marriage had been a disgrace; who was all the time, no doubt, cherishing such thoughts in that black, proud head of his, while she, her father's daughter, was sitting opposite to him?
"How am I ever going to bear it—all these months?" she asked herself.
CHAPTER II
But the causes which had brought Laura Fountain to Bannisdale were very simple. It had all come about in the most natural inevitable way.
When Laura was eight years old—nearly thirteen years before this date—her father, then a widower with one child, had fallen in with and married Alan Helbeck's sister. At the time of their first meeting with the little Catholic spinster, Stephen Fountain and his child were spending part of the Cambridge vacation at a village on the Cumberland coast where a fine air could be combined with cheap lodgings. Fountain himself was from the North Country. His grandfather had been a small Lancashire yeoman, and Stephen Fountain had an inbred liking for the fells, the farmhouses, and even the rain of his native district. Before descending to the sea, he and his child had spent a couple of days with his cousin by marriage, James Mason, in the lonely stone house among the hills, which had belonged to the family since the Revolution. He left it gladly, however, for the farm life seemed to him much harder and more squalid than he had remembered it to be, and he disliked James Mason's wife. As he and Laura walked down the long, rough track connecting the farm with the main road on the day of their departure, Stephen Fountain whistled so loud and merrily that the skipping child beside him looked at him with astonishment.
