"My dear, where are the girls?"

The speaker was Dr. Friedland, the only intimate friend Stephen Fountain had ever made at Cambridge. The person addressed was Dr. Friedland's wife.

On hearing her husband's question, that lady's gentle and benevolent countenance emerged from the folds of a newspaper. It was the "first mild day of March," and she and her husband had been enjoying an after-breakfast chat in the garden of a Cambridge villa.

"Molly is arranging the flowers; Laura has had a long letter from Mrs.
Fountain, and is now, I believe, gone to answer it."

"Then I shan't enjoy my lunch," said Dr. Friedland pensively.

He was an elderly gentleman, with a short beard and moustache turning to white, particularly black eyes, and a handsome brow. His wife had put a rug over his shoulders, and another over his knees, before she allowed him the "Times" and a cigarette. Amid the ample folds of these draperies, he had a Jove-like and benignant air.

His wife inquired what difference Miss Fountain's correspondence would or could make to her host's luncheon.

"Because she won't eat any," said the doctor, with a sigh, "and I find it infectious."

Mrs. Friedland laid down her newspaper.

"There is no doubt she is worried—about Mrs. Fountain."

"E tutti quanti" said the doctor, humming a tune. "My dear, it is surprising what an admiration I find myself possessed of for Sir John Pringle."

"Sir John Pringle?" said the lady, in bewilderment.

"Bozzy, my dear—the great Bozzy—amid the experiments of his youth, turned Catholic. His distracted relations deputed Sir John Pringle to deal with him. That great lawyer pointed out the worldly disadvantages of the step. Bozzy pleaded his immortal soul. Whereupon Sir John observed with warmth that anyone possessing a particle of gentlemanly spirit would sooner be damned to all eternity than give his relations so much trouble as Bozzy was giving his!"

"The application is not clear," said Mrs. Friedland.

"No," said the doctor, stretching his legs and puffing at his cigarette; "but when you speak of Laura, and tell me she is writing to Bannisdale, I find a comfort in Sir John Pringle."

"It would be more to the purpose if Laura did!" exclaimed Mrs. Friedland.

The doctor shook his head, and fell into a reverie. Presently he asked:

"You think Mrs. Fountain is really worse?"

"Laura is sure of it. And the difficulty is, what is she to do? If she goes to Bannisdale, she exiles Mr. Helbeck. Yet, if his sister is really in danger, Mr. Helbeck naturally will desire to be at home."

"And they can't meet?"

"Under the same roof—and the old conditions? Heaven forbid!" said Mrs.
Friedland.

"Risk it!" said the doctor, violently slapping his fist on the little garden table that held his box of cigarettes.

"John!"

"My dear—don't be a hypocrite! You and I know well enough what's wrong with that child."

"Perhaps." The lady's eyes filled with tears. "But you forget that by all accounts Mr. Helbeck is an altered man. From something Laura said to Molly last week, it seems that Mrs. Fountain even is now quite afraid of him—as she used to be."

"If she would only die—good lady!—her brother might go to his own place," said the doctor impatiently.

"To the Jesuits?"

The doctor nodded.

"Did he actually tell you that was his intention?"

"No. But I guessed. And that Trinity man Leadham, who went over, gave me to understand the other day what the end would probably be. But not while his sister lives."

"I should hope not!" said Mrs. Friedland.

After a pause, she turned to her husband.

"John! you know you liked him!"

"If you mean by that, my dear, that I showed a deplorable weakness in dealing with him, my conscience supports you!" said the doctor; "but I would have you remember that for a person of my quiet habits, to have a gentleman pale as death in your study, demanding his lady-love—you knowing all the time that the lady-love is upstairs—and only one elderly man between them—is an agitating situation."

"Poor Laura!—poor Mr. Helbeck!" murmured Mrs. Friedland. The agony of the man, the resolution of the girl, stood out sharply from the medley of the past.

"All very well, my dear—all very well. But you showed a pusillanimity on that occasion that I scorn to qualify. You were afraid of that child—positively afraid of her. I could have dealt with her in a twinkling, if you'd left her to me."

"What would you have said to her?" inquired Mrs. Friedland gently.

"How can there be any possible doubt what I should have said to her?" said the doctor, slapping his knee. "'My dear, you love him—ergo, marry him!' That first and foremost. 'And as to those other trifles, what have you to do with them? Look over them—look round them! Rise, my dear, to your proper dignity and destiny—have a right and natural pride—in the rock that bore you! You, a child of the Greater Church—of an Authority of which all other authorities are the mere caricature—why all this humiliation, these misgivings—this turmoil? Take a serener—take a loftier view!' Ah! if I could evoke Fountain for one hour!"

The doctor bent forward, his hands hanging over his knees, his lips moving without sound, under the sentences his brain was forming. This habit of silent rhetoric represented a curious compromise between a natural impetuosity of temperament, and the caution of scientific research. His wife watched him with a loving, half-amused eye.

"And what, pray, could Mr. Fountain do, John, but make matters ten times worse?"

"Do!—who wants him to do anything? But ten years ago he might have done something. Listen to me, Jane!" He seized his wife's arm. "He makes Laura a child of Knowledge, a child of Freedom, a child of Revolution—without an ounce of training to fit her for the part. It is like an heir—flung to the gypsies. Then you put her to the test—sorely—conspicuously. And she stands fast—she does not yield—it is not in her blood, scarcely in her power, to yield. But it is a blind instinct carried through at what a cost! You might have equipped and fortified her. You did neither. You trusted everything to the passionate loyalty of the woman. And it does not fail you. But——!"

The doctor shook his head, long and slowly. Mrs. Friedland quietly replaced the rugs which had gone wandering, in the energy of these remarks.

"You see, Jane, if it's true—'ne croit qui veut'—it's still more true, 'ne doute qui veut!' To doubt—doubt wholesomely, cheerfully, fruitfully—why, my dear, there's no harder task in the world! And a woman, who thinks with her heart—who can't stand on her own feet as a man can—you remove her from all her normal shelters and supports—you expect her to fling a 'No!' in the face of half her natural friends—and then you are too indolent or too fastidious to train the poor child for her work!—Fountain took Laura out of her generation, and gave her nothing in return. Did he read with her—share his mind with her? Never! He was indolent;-she was wilful; so the thing slid. But all the time he made a partisan of her—he expected her to echo his hates and his prejudice—he stamped himself and his cause deep into her affections——

"And then, my dear, she must needs fall in love with this man, this Catholic! Catholicism at its best—worse luck! No mean or puerile type, with all its fetishisms and unreasons on its head—no!—a type sprung from the finest English blood, disciplined by heroic memories, by the persecution and hardships of the Penal Laws. What happens? Why, of course the girl's imagination goes over! Her father in her—her temperament—stand in the way of anything more. But where is she to look for self-respect, for peace of mind? She feels herself an infidel—a moral outcast. She trembles before the claims of this great visible system. Her reason refuses them—but why? She cannot tell. For Heaven's sake, why do we leave our children's minds empty like this? If you believe, my good friend, Educate! And if you doubt, still more—Educate! Educate!"

The doctor rose in his might, tossed his rugs from him, and began to pace a sheltered path, leaning on his wife's arm.

Mrs. Friedland looked at him slyly, and laughed.

"So if Laura had been learned, she might have been happy?—John!—what a paradox!"

"Not mine then!—but the Almighty's—who seems to have included a mind in this odd bundle that makes up Laura. What! You set a woman to fight for ideas, and then deny her all knowledge of what they mean. Happy! Of course she might have been happy. She might have made her Catholic respect her. He offered her terms—she might have accepted them with a free and equal mind. There would have been none, anyway, of this moral doubt—this bogeyfication of things she don't understand! Ah! here she comes. Now just look at her, Jane! What's your housekeeping after? She's lost half a stone this month if she's lost an ounce."

And the doctor standing still peered discontentedly through his spectacles at the advancing figure.

Laura approached slowly, with her hands behind her, looking on her way at the daffodils and tulips just opening in the garden border.

"Pater!—Molly says you and Mater are to come in. It's March and not May, you'll please to remember."

She came up to them with the airs of a daughter, put a flower in Mrs. Friedland's dress—ran for one of the discarded rugs, and draped it again round the doctor's ample shoulders. Her manner to the two elderly folk was much softer and freer than it had ever been in the days of her old acquaintance with them. A wistful gratitude played through it, revealing a new Laura—a Laura that had passed, in these five months through deep waters, and had been forced, in spite of pride, to throw herself upon the friendly and saving hands held out to her.

They on their side looked at her with a tender concern, which tried to disguise itself in chat. The doctor hooked his arm through hers, and made her examine the garden.

"Look at these Lent lilies, Miss Laura. They will be out in two days at most."

Laura bent over them, then suddenly drew herself erect. The doctor felt the stiffening of the little arm.

"I suppose you had sheets of them in the north," he said innocently, as he poked a stone away from the head of an emerging hyacinth.

"Yes—a great many." She looked absently straight before her, taking no more notice of the flowers.

"Well—and Mrs. Fountain? Are you really anxious?"

The girl hesitated.

"She is ill—quite ill. I ought to see her somehow."

"Well, my dear, go!" He looked round upon her with a cheerful decision.

"No—that isn't possible," she said quietly. "But I might stay somewhere near. She must have lost a great deal of strength since Christmas."

At Christmas and for some time afterwards, she and Mrs. Fountain had been at St. Leonard's together. In fact, it was little more than a fortnight since Laura had parted from her stepmother, who had shown a piteous unwillingness to go back alone to Bannisdale.

The garden door opened and shut; a white-capped servant came along the path. A gentleman—for Miss Fountain.

"For me?" The girl's cheek flushed involuntarily. "Why, Pater—who is it?"

For behind the servant came the gentleman—a tall and comely youth, with narrow blue eyes, a square chin, and a very conscious smile. He was well dressed in a dark serge suit, and showed a great deal of white cuff, and a conspicuous watch-chain, as he took off his hat.

"Hubert!"

Laura advanced to him, with a face of astonishment, and held out her hand.

Mason greeted her with a mixture of confusion and assurance, glancing behind her at the Friedlands all the time. "Well, I was here on some business—and I thought I'd look you up, don't you know?"

"My cousin, Hubert Mason," said Laura, turning to the old people.

Friedland lifted his wide-awake. Mrs. Friedland, whose gentle face could be all criticism, eyed him quietly, and shook hands perfunctorily. A few nothings passed on the weather and the spring. Suddenly Mason said:

"Would you take a walk with me, Miss Laura?"

After a momentary hesitation, she assented, and went into the house for her walking things. Mason hurriedly approached the doctor.

"Why, she looks—she looks as if you could blow her away!" he cried, staring into the doctor's face, while his own flushed.

"Miss Fountain's health has not been strong this winter," said the doctor gravely, his spectacled eyes travelling up and down Mason's tall figure. "You, I suppose, became acquainted with her in Westmoreland?"

"Acquainted with her!" The young man checked himself, flushed still redder, then resumed. "Well, we're cousins, you see—though of course I don't mean to say that we're her sort—you understand?"

"Miss Fountain is ready," said Mrs. Friedland.

Mason looked round, saw the little figure in the doorway, and hastily saluting the Friedlands, took his leave.

"My dear," said the doctor anxiously, laying hold on his wife's arm, "should we have asked him to lunch?"

His wife smiled.

"By no means. That's Laura's business."

"Well, but, Jane—Jane! had you realised that young man?"

"Oh dear, yes," said Mrs. Friedland. "Don't excite yourself, John."

"Laura—gone out with a young man," said the doctor, musing. "I have been waiting for that all the winter—and he's extremely good-looking, Jane."

Mrs. Friedland lost patience.

"John! I really can't talk to you, if you're as dense as that."

"Talk to me!" cried the doctor—"why, you unreasonable woman, you haven't vouchsafed me a single word!"

"Well, and why should I?" said Mrs. Friedland provokingly.

* * * * *

Half an hour passed away. Mason and Laura were sitting in the garden of
Trinity.

Up till now, Laura had no very clear idea of what they had been talking about. Mason, it appeared, had been granted three days' holiday by his employers, and had made use of it to come to Cambridge and present a letter of introduction from his old teacher, Castle, the Whinthorpe organist, to a famous Cambridge musician. But, at first, he was far more anxious to discuss Laura's affairs than to explain his own; and Laura had found it no easy matter to keep him at arm's length. For nine months, Mason had brooded, gossiped, and excused himself; now, conscious of being somehow a fine fellow again, he had come boldly to play the cousin—perhaps something more. He offered now a few words of stammering apology on the subject of his letter to Laura after the announcement of her engagement. She received them in silence; and the matter dropped.

As to his moral recovery, and material prospects, his manners and appearance were enough. A fledgeling ambition, conscious of new aims and chances, revealed itself in all he said. The turbid elements in the character were settling down; the permanent lines of it, strong, vulgar, self-complacent, emerged.

Here, indeed, was a successful man in the making. Once or twice the girl's beautiful eyes opened suddenly, and then sank again. Before her rose the rocky chasm of the Greet; the sound of the water was in her ears—the boyish tones of remorse, of entreaty.

"And you know I'll make some money out of my songs before long—see if I don't! I took some of em to the Professor this morning—and, my word, didn't he like em! Why, I couldn't repeat the things he said—you'd think I was bluffing!"

Strange gift!—"settling unaware"—on this rude nature and poor intelligence! But Laura looked up eagerly. Here she softened; here was the bridge between them. And when he spoke of his new friend, the young musical apostle who had reclaimed him, there was a note which pleased her. She began to smile upon him more freely; the sadness of her little face grew sweet.

And suddenly the young man stopped and looked at her. He reddened; and she flushed too, not knowing why.

"Well, that's where 'tis," he said, moving towards her on the seat. "I'm going to get on. I told you I was, long ago, and it's come true. My salary'll be a decent figure before this year's out, and I'm certain I'll make something out of the songs. Then there's my share of the farm. Mother don't give me more than she's obliged; but it's a tidy bit sometimes. Laura!—look here!—I know there's nothing in the way now. You were a plucky girl, you were, to throw that up. I always said so—I didn't care what people thought. Well, but now—you're free—and I'm a better sort—won't you give a fellow a chance?"

Midway, his new self-confidence left him. She sat there so silent, so delicately white! He had but to put out his hand to grasp her; and he dared, not move a finger. He stared at her, breathless and open-mouthed.

But she did not take it tragically at all. After a moment, she began to laugh, and shook her head.

"Do you mean that you want me to marry you, Hubert? Oh! you'd so soon be tired of that!—You don't know anything about me, really—we shouldn't suit each other at all."

His face fell. He drew sullenly away from her, and bending forward, began to poke at the grass with his stick.

"I see how 'tis. I'm not good enough for you—and I don't suppose I ever shall be."

She looked at him with a smiling compassion.

"I'm not in love with you, Mr. Hubert—that's all."

"No—you've never got over them things that happened up at Whinthorpe," he said roughly. "I've got a bone to pick with you though. Why did you give me the slip that night?"

He looked up. But in spite of his bravado, he reddened again, deeply.

"Well—you hadn't exactly commended yourself as an escort, had you?" she said lightly. But her tone pricked.

"I hadn't had a drop of anything," he declared hotly; "and I'd have looked after you, and stopped a deal of gossip. You hurt my feelings pretty badly. I can tell you."

"Did I?—Well, as you hurt mine on the first occasion, let's cry quits."

He was silent for a little, throwing furtive glances at her from time to time. She was wonderfully thin and fragile, but wonderfully pretty, as she sat there under the cedar.

At last he said, with a grumbling note:

"I wish you wouldn't look so thin and dowie-like, as we say up at home—you've no cause to fret, I'm sure."

The temper of twenty-one gave way. Laura sat up—nay, rose.

"Will you please come and look at the sights?—or shall I go home?"

He looked up at her flashing face, and stuck to his seat.

"I say—Miss Laura—you don't know how you bowl a fellow over!"

The expression of his handsome countenance—so childish still through all its athlete's force—propitiated her. And yet she felt instinctively that his fancy for her no longer went so deep as it had once done.

Well!—she was glad; of course she was glad.

"Oh! you're not so very much to be pitied," she said; but her hand lighted a moment kindly and shyly on the young man's arm. "Now, if you wouldn't talk about these things, Hubert—do you know what I should be doing?—I should be asking you to do me a service."

His manner changed—became businesslike and mannish at once.

"Then you'll please sit down again—and tell me what it is," he said.

She obeyed. He crossed his knees, and listened.

But she had some difficulty in putting it. At last she said, looking away from him:

"Do you think, if I proposed it, your mother could bear to have me on a visit to the farm?"

"Mother!—you!" he said in astonishment. A hundred notions blazed up in his mind. What on earth did she want to be in those parts again for?

"My stepmother is very unwell," she said hurriedly. "It—well, it troubles me not to see her. But I can't go to Bannisdale. If your mother doesn't hate me now, as she did last summer—perhaps—she and Polly would take me in for a while?"

He frowned over it—taking the airs of the relative and the counsellor.

"Mother didn't say much—well—about your affair. But Polly says she's never spoken again you since. But I expect—you know what she'd be afraid of?"

He nodded sagaciously.

"I can't imagine," said Laura, instantly. But the stiffening of her slight frame betrayed her.

"Why, of course—Miss Laura—you see she'd be afraid of its coming on again."

There was silence. The broad rim of Laura's velvet hat hid her face.
Hubert began to be uncomfortable.

"I don't say as she'd have cause to," he said slowly; "but——"

Laura suddenly laughed, and Mason opened his eyes in astonishment. Such a strange little dry sound!

"Of course, if your mother were to think such things and to say them to me—every time I went to Bannisdale, I couldn't stay. But I want to see Augustina very, very much." Her voice wavered. "And I could easily go to her—if I were close by—when she was alone. And of course I should be no expense. Your mother knows I have my own money."

Hubert nodded. He was trying hard to read her face, but—what the deuce made girls so close? His countenance brightened however.

"All right. I'll see to it—I'll manage it—you wait."

"Ah! but stop a minute." Her smile shone out from the shadow of the hat.
"If I go there's a condition. While I'm there, you mustn't come."

The young fellow flung away from her with a passionate exclamation, and her smile dropped—lost itself in a sweet distress, unlike the old wild Laura.

"I seem to be falling out with you all the time," she said in haste—"and I don't want to a bit! But indeed—it will be much better. You see, if you were to be coming over to pay visits to me—you would think it your duty to make love to me!"

"Well—and if I did?" he said fiercely.

"It would only put off the time of our making real friends. And—and—I do care very much for papa's people."

The tears leapt to her eyes for the first time. She held out her ungloved hand.

Reluctantly, and without looking at her, he took it. The touch of it roused a tempest in him. He crushed it and threw it away from him.

"Oh! if you'd never seen that man!" he groaned.

She got up without a word, and presently they were walking through the "backs," and she was gradually taming and appeasing him. By the time they reached the street gate of King's he was again in the full tide of musical talk and boasting, quite aware besides that his good looks and his magnificent physique drew the attention of the passers-by.

"Why, they're a poor lot—these 'Varsity men!" he said once contemptuously, as they passed a group of rather weedy undergraduates—"I could throw ten of em at one go!"

And perpetually he talked of money, the cost of his lodgings, of his railway fare, the swindling ways of the south. After all, the painful habits of generations had not run to waste; the mother began to show in the son.

In the street they parted. As he was saying good-bye to her, his look suddenly changed.

"I say!—that's the girl I travelled down with yesterday! And, by Jove! she knew me!"

And with a last nod to Laura, he darted after a tall woman who had thrown him a glance from the further pavement. Laura recognised the smart and buxom daughter of a Cambridge tradesman, a young lady whose hair, shoulders, millinery, and repartees were all equally pronounced.

* * * * *

Miss Fountain smiled, and turned away. But in the act of doing so, she came to a sudden stop. A face had arrested her—she stood bewildered.

A man walking in the road came towards her.

"I see that you recognise me, Miss Fountain!"

The ambiguous voice—the dark, delicate face—the clumsy gait—she knew them all. But—she stared in utter astonishment. The man who addressed her wore a short round coat and soft hat; a new beard covered his chin; his flannel shirt was loosely tied at the throat by a silk handkerchief. And over all the same air of personal slovenliness and ill-breeding.

"You didn't expect to see me in this dress, Miss Fountain? Let me walk a few steps with you, if I may. You perhaps hadn't heard that I had left the Jesuits—and ceased indeed to be a Catholic."

Her mind whirled, as she recognised the scholastic. She saw the study at
Bannisdale—and Helbeck bending over her.

"No, indeed—I had not heard," she stammered, as they walked on. "Was it long ago?"

"Only a couple of months. The crisis came in January——"

And he broke out into a flood of autobiography. Already at Bannisdale he had been in confusion of mind—the voices of art and liberty calling to him each hour more loudly—his loyalty to Helbeck, to his boyish ideals, to his Jesuit training, holding him back.

"I believe, Miss Fountain"—the colour rushed into his womanish cheek—"you overheard us that evening—you know what I owe to that admirable, that extraordinary man. May I be frank? We have both been through deep waters!"

The girl's face grew rigid. Involuntarily she put a wider space between herself and him. But he did not notice.

"It will be no news to you, Miss Fountain, that Mr. Helbeck's engagement troubled his Catholic friends. I chose to take it morbidly to heart—I ventured that—that most presumptuous attack upon him." He laughed, with an affected note that made her think him odious. "But you were soon avenged. You little know, Miss Fountain, what an influence your presence at Bannisdale had upon me. It—well! it was like a rebel army, perpetually there, to help—to support, the rebel in myself. I saw the struggle—the protest in you. My own grew fiercer. Oh! those days of painting!—and always the stabbing thought, never again! I must confess even the passionate delight this has given me—the irreligious ideas it has excited. All my religious habits lost power—I could not meditate—I was always thinking of the problem of my work. Clearly I must never touch, a brush again.—For I was very soon to take orders—then to go out to missionary work. Well, I put the painting aside—I trampled on myself—I went to see my father and sister, and rejoiced in the humiliations they put upon me. Mr. Helbeck was all kindness, but he was naturally the last person I could confide in. Then, Miss Fountain, I went back, back to the Jesuit routine——"

He paused, looking instinctively for a glance from her. But she gave him none.

"And in three weeks it broke down under me for ever. I gave it up. I am a free man. Of the wrench I say nothing." He drew himself up with a shudder, which seemed to her theatrical. "There are sufferings one must not talk of. The Society have not been ungenerous. They actually gave me a little money. But, of course, for all my Catholic friends it is like death. They know me no more."

Then for the first time his companion turned towards him. Her eyelids lifted. Her lips framed rather than spoke the words, "Mr. Helbeck?"

"Ah! Mr. Helbeck—I am not mistaken, Miss Fountain, in thinking that I may now speak of Mr. Helbeck with more freedom?"

"My engagement with Mr. Helbeck is broken off," she said coldly. "But you were saying something of yourself?"

A momentary expression of dislike and disappointment crossed his face. He was of a soft, sensuous temperament, and had expected a good deal of sympathy from Miss Fountain.

"Mr. Helbeck has done what all of us might expect," he said, not without a betraying sharpness. "He has cast me off in the sternest way. Henceforth he knows me no more. Bannisdale is closed to me. But, indeed, the news from that quarter fills me with alarm."

Laura looked up again eagerly, involuntarily.

"Mr. Helbeck, by all accounts, grows more and more extreme—more and more solitary.—But of course your stepmother will have kept you informed. It was always to be foreseen. What was once a beautiful devotion, has become, with years—and, I suppose, opposition—a stern unbending passion—may not one say, a gloomy bigotry?"

He sighed delicately. Through the girl's stormy sense there ran a dumb rush of thoughts—"Insolent! ungrateful! He wounds the heart that loved him—and then dares to discuss—to blame!"

But before she could find something to say aloud, her companion resumed.

"But I must not complain. I was honoured by a superior man's friendship. He has withdrawn it. He has the right.—Now I must look to the future. You will, I think, be glad to hear that I am not in that destitute condition which generally awaits the Catholic deserter. My prospects indeed seem to be secured."

And with a vanity which did not escape her, he described the overtures that had been made to him by the editor of a periodical which was to represent "the new mystical school"—he spoke familiarly of great artists, and especially French ones, murdering the French names in a way that at once hurt the girl's ears, and pleased her secret spite against him—he threw in a critic or two without the Mr.—and he casually mentioned a few lords as persons on whom genius and necessity could rely.

All this in a confidential and appealing tone, which he no doubt imagined to be most suitable to women, especially young women. Laura thought it impertinent and unbecoming, and longed to be rid of him. At last the turning to the Friedlands' house appeared. She stood still, and stiffly wished him good-bye.

But he retained her hand and pressed it ardently.

"Oh! Miss Fountain—we have both suffered!"

* * * * *

The girl could hardly pacify herself enough to go in. Again and again she found a pleasure in those words of her French novel that she had repeated to Helbeck long ago: "Imagination faussÉe et troublÉe—faussÉe et troublÉe."

No delicacy—no modesty—no compunction! Her own poor heart flew to Bannisdale. She thought of all that the Squire had suffered in this man's cause. Outrage—popular hatred—her own protests and petulances,—all met with so unbending a dignity, so inviolable a fidelity, both to his friend and to his Church! She recalled that scarred brow—that kind and brotherly affection—that passionate sympathy which had made the heir of one of the most ancient names in England the intimate counsellor and protector of the wheelwright's son.

Popinjay!—renegade!—to come to her talking of "bigotry"—without a breath of true tenderness or natural remorse. Williams had done that which she had angrily maintained in that bygone debate with Helbeck he had every right to do. And she had nothing but condemnation. She walked up and down the shady road, her eyes blinded with tears. One more blow upon the heart that she herself had smitten so hard! Sympathy for this new pain took her back to every incident of the old—to every detail of that hideous week which had followed upon her flight.

How had she lived through it? Those letters—that distant voice in Dr.
Friedland's study—her own piteous craving——

For the thousandth time, with the old dreary conviction, she said to herself that she had done right—terribly, incredibly right.

But all the while, she seemed to be sitting beside him in his study—laying her cheek upon his hand—eagerly comforting him for this last sorrow. His inexorable breach with Williams—well! it was part of his character—she would not have it otherwise. All that had angered her as imagination, was now natural and dignified as reality. Her thoughts proudly defended it. Let him be rigorous towards others if he pleased—he had been first king and master of himself.

* * * * *

Next day Molly Friedland and Laura went to London for the day. Laura was taking music lessons, as one means of driving time a little quicker; and there was shopping to be done both for the household and for themselves.

In the afternoon, as the girls were in Sloane Street together, Laura suddenly asked Molly to meet her in an hour at a friend's house, where they were to have tea. "I have something I want to do by myself." Molly asked no questions, and they parted.

A few minutes later, Laura stepped into the church of the Brompton
Oratory. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Benediction was about to begin.

She drew down her thick veil, and took a seat near the door. The great heavy church was still nearly dark, save for a dim light in the sanctuary. But it was slowly filling with people, and she watched the congregation.

In front of her was a stout and fashionably dressed young man with an eyeglass and stick—evidently a stranger. He sat stolid and motionless, one knee crossed over the other, scrutinising everything that went on as though he had been at the play. Presently, a great many men began to stream in, most of them bald and grey, but some young fellows, who dropped eagerly on their knees as they entered, and rose reluctantly. Nuns in black hoods and habits would come briskly up, kneel and say a prayer, then go out again. Or sometimes they brought schools—girls, two and two—and ranged them decorously for the service. An elderly man, of the workman class, appeared with his small son, and sat in front of Laura. The child played tricks; the man drew it tenderly within his arm, and kept it quiet, while he himself told his beads. Then a girl with wild eyes and touzled hair, probably Irish, with her baby in her arms, sat down at the end of Laura's seat, stared round her for a few minutes, dropped to the altar, and went away. And all the time smartly dressed ladies came and went incessantly, knelt at side altars, crossed themselves, said a few rapid prayers, or disappeared into the mysteries of side aisles behind screens and barriers—going no doubt to confession.

There was an extraordinary life in it all. Here was no languid acceptance of a respectable habit. Something was eagerly wanted—diligently sought.

Laura looked round her, with a sigh from her inmost heart. But the vast church seemed to her ugly and inhuman. She remembered a saying of her father's as to its "vicious Roman style"—the "tomb of the Italian mind."

What matter?

Ah!—Suddenly a dim surpliced figure in the distance, and lights springing like stars in the apse. Presently the high altar, in a soft glow, shone out upon the dark church. All was still silent; the sanctuary spoke in light.

For a few minutes. Then this exquisite and magical effect broke up. The lighting spread through the church, became commonplace, showed the pompous lines of capital and cornice, the bad sculpture in the niches. A procession entered, and the service began.

Laura dropped on her knees. But she was no longer in London, in the Oratory church. She was far away, in the chapel of an old northern house, where the walls glowed with strange figures, and a dark crucifix hovered austerely above the altar. She saw the small scattered congregation; Father Bowles's grey head and blanched, weak face; Augustina in her long widow's veil; the Squire in his corner. The same words were being said there now, at this same hour. She looked at her watch, then hid her eyes again, tortured with a sick yearning.

But when she came out, twenty minutes later, her step was more alert. For a little while, she had been almost happy.

* * * * *

That night, after the returned travellers had finished their supper, the doctor was in a talking mood. He had an old friend with him a thinker and historian like himself. Both of them had lately come across "Leadham of Trinity"—the convert and Jesuit, who was now engaged upon an important Catholic memoir, and was settled for a time, within reach of Cambridge libraries.

"You knew Father Leadham in the north, Miss Laura?" asked the doctor, as the girls came into the drawing-room.

Laura started.

"I saw him two or three times," she said, as she made her way to the warm but dark corner near the fire. "Is he in Cambridge?"

The doctor nodded.

"Come to embrace us all—breathing benediction on learning and on science! There has been a Catholic Congress somewhere."—He looked at his friend. "That will show us the way!"

The friend—a small, lively-eyed, black-bearded man, just returned from some theological work in a German university—threw back his head and laughed good-humouredly.

The talk turned on Catholic learning old and new; on the assumptions and limitations of it; on the forms taken by the most recent Catholic Apologetic; and so, like a vessel descending a great river, passed out at last, steered by Friedland, among the breakers of first principles.

As a rule the doctor talked in paradox and ellipse. He threw his sentences into air, and let them find their feet as they could.

But to-day, unconsciously, his talk took a tone that was rare with him—became prophetical, pontifical—assumed a note of unction. And often, as Molly noticed, with a slight instinctive gesture—a fatherly turning towards that golden spot made by Laura's hair among the shadows.

His friend fell silent after a while—watching Friedland with small sharp
eyes. He had come there to discuss a new edition of Sidonius
Apollinaris,—was himself one of the driest and acutest of investigators.
All this talk for babes seemed to him the merest waste of time.

Friedland, however, with a curious feeling, let himself be carried away by it.

A little Catholic manual of Church history had fallen into his hands that morning. His fingers played with it as it lay on the table, and with the pages of a magazine beside it that contained an article by Father Leadham.

No doubt some common element in the two had roused him.——

"The Catholic war with history," he said, "is perennial! History, in fact, is the great rationalist; and the Catholic conscience is scandalised by her. And so we have these pitiful little books—" he laid his hand on the volume beside him—"which simply expunge history, or make it afresh. And we have a piece of Jesuit apologia, like this paper of Leadham's—so charming, in a sense, so scholarly! And yet one feels through it a cry of the soul—the Catholic arraignment of history, that she is what she is!"

"You'll find it in Newman—often," said the black-bearded man suddenly—and he ran through a list of passages, rapidly, in the student's way.

"Ah! Newman!" said Friedland with vivacity. "This morning I read over that sermon of his he delivered to the Oscott Synod, after the re-establishment of the Hierarchy—you remember it, Dalton?—What a flow and thunder in the sentences!—what an elevation in the thought! Who would not rather lament with Newman, than exult with Froude?—But here again, it is history that is the rationalist—not we poor historians!

"… Why was England lost to the Church? Because Henry was a villain?—because the Tudor bishops were slaves and poltroons? Does Leadham, or any other rational man really think so?"

The little black man nodded. He did not think it worth while to speak.

But Friedland went on enlarging, with his hand on his Molly's head—looking into her quiet eyes.

"… The fact is, the Catholic, who is in love with his Church, cannot let himself realise truly what the Home of the Renaissance meant: But turn your back on all the Protestant crew—even on Erasmus. Ask only those Catholic witnesses who were at the fountain-head, who saw the truth face to face. And then—ponder a little, what it was that really happened in those forty-five years of Elizabeth….

"Can Leadham, can anyone deny that the nation rose in them to the full stature of its manhood—to a buoyant and fruitful maturity? And more—if it had not been for some profound movement of the national life,—some irresistible revolt of the common intelligence, the common conscience—does anyone suppose that the whims and violences of any trumpery king could have broken the links with Rome?—that such a life and death as More's could have fallen barren on English hearts? Never!—How shallow are all the official explanations—how deep down lies the truth!"

Out of the monologues that followed, broken often by the impatience or the eagerness of Dalton, Molly, at least, who worked much with her father, remembered fragments like the following:

"… The figure of the Church,—spouse or captive, bride or martyr,—as she has become personified in Catholic imagination, is surely among the greatest, the most ravishing, of human conceptions. It ranks with the image of 'Jahve's Servant' in the poetry of Israel. And yet behind her, as she moves through history, the modern sees the rising of something more majestic still—the free human spirit, in its contact with the infinite sources of things!—the Jerusalem which is the mother of us all—the Greater, the Diviner Church…. Into her Ursula-robe all lesser forms are gathered. But she is not only a maternal, a generative power—she is chastisement and convulsion.

"… Look back again to that great rising of the North against the South, that we call the Reformation.—Catholicism of course is saved with the rest.—One may almost say that Newman's own type is made possible—all that touches and charms us in English Catholics has its birth, because York, Canterbury, and Salisbury are lost to the Mass.

"And abroad?—I always find a sombre fascination in the spectacle of the Tridentine reform. The Church in her stern repentance breaks all her toys, burns all her books! She shakes herself free from Guicciardini's 'herd of wretches.' She shuts her gates on the knowledge and the freedom that have rent her—and within her strengthened walls she sits, pondering on judgment to come. In so far as her submission is incomplete, she is raising new reckonings against herself every hour.—But for the moment the moralising influence of the lay intelligence has saved her—a new strength flows through her old veins.

"… And so with scholarship.—The great fabric of Gallican and Benedictine learning rises into being, under the hammer blows of a hostile research. The Catholics of Germany, says Renan, are particularly distinguished for acuteness and breadth of ideas. Why? Because of the 'perpetual contact of Protestant criticism.'—

"… More and more we shall come to see that it is the World that is the salt of the Church! She owes far more to her enemies than to any of her canonised saints. One may almost say that she lives on what the World can spare her of its virtues."

Laura, in her dark corner, had almost disappeared from sight. Molly, the soft, round-faced, spectacled Molly, turned now and then from her friend to her father. She would give Friedland sometimes a gentle restraining touch—her lips shaped themselves, as though she said, "Take care!"

And gradually Friedland fell upon things more intimate—the old topics of the relation between Catholicism and the will, Catholicism and conscience.

"… I often think we should be the better for some chair of 'The Inner Life,' at an English University!" he said presently, with a smile at Molly.—"What does the ordinary Protestant know of all those treasures of spiritual experience which Catholicism has secreted for centuries? There is the debt of debts that we all owe to the Catholic Church.

"Well!—Some day, no doubt, we shall all be able to make a richer use of what she has so abundantly to give.—

"At present what one sees going on in the modern world is a vast transformation of moral ideas, which for the moment holds the field. Beside the older ethical fabric—the fabric that the Church built up out of Greek and Jewish material—a new is rising. We think a hundred things unlawful that a Catholic permits; on the other hand, a hundred prohibitions of the older faith have lost their force. And at the same time, for half our race, the old terrors and eschatologies are no more. We fear evil for quite different reasons; we think of it in quite different ways. And the net result in the best moderns is at once a great elaboration of conscience—and an almost intoxicating sense of freedom.—

"Here, no doubt, it is the personal abjection of Catholicism, that jars upon us most—that divides it deepest from the modern spirit.—Molly!—don't frown!—Abjection is a Catholic word—essentially a Catholic temper. It means the ugliest and the loveliest things. It covers the most various types—from the nauseous hysteria of a Margaret Mary Alacoque, to the exquisite beauty of the Imitation…. And it derives its chief force, for good and evil, from the belief in the Mass. There again, how little the Protestant understands what he reviles! In one sense he understands it well enough. Catholicism would have disappeared long ago but for the Mass. Marvellous indestructible belief!—that brings God to Man, that satisfies the deepest emotions of the human heart!—

"What will the religion of the free mind discover to put in its place? Something, it must find. For the hold of Catholicism—or its analogues—upon the guiding forces of Christendom is irretrievably broken. And yet the needs of the soul remain the same….

"Some compensation, no doubt, we shall reap from that added sense of power and wealth, which the change in the root ideas of life has brought with it for many people. Humanity has walked for centuries under the shadow of the Fall, with all that it involves. Now, a precisely opposite conception is slowly incorporating itself with all the forms of European thought. It is the disappearance—the rise—of a world. At the beginning of the century, Coleridge foresaw it.

"… The transformation affects the whole of personality! The mass of men who read and think, and lead straight lives to-day, are often conscious of a dignity and range their fathers never knew. The spiritual stature of civilised man has risen—like his physical stature! We walk to-day a nobler earth. We come—not as outcasts, but as sons and freemen, into the House of God.—But all the secrets and formulae of a new mystical union have to be worked out. And so long as pain and death remain, humanity will always be at heart a mystic!"

* * * * *

Gradually, as the old man touched these more penetrating and personal matters, the head among the shadows had emerged. The beautiful eyes, so full—unconsciously full—of sad and torturing thought, rested upon the speaker. Friedland became sensitively conscious of them. The grey-haired scholar was in truth one of the most religious of men and optimists. The negations of his talk began to trouble him—in sight of this young grief and passion. He drew upon all that his heart could find to say of things fruitful and consoling. After the liberating joys of battle, he must needs follow the perennial human instinct and build anew the "Civitas Dei."

* * * * *

When Friedland and his wife were left alone, Friedland said with timidity:

"Jane, I played the preacher to-night, and preaching is foolishness. But I would willingly brace that poor child's mind a little. And it seemed to me she listened."

Mrs. Friedland laughed under her breath—the saddest laugh.

"Do you know what the child was doing this afternoon?"

"No."

"She went to the Oratory—to Benediction." Friedland looked up startled—then understood—raised his hands and let them drop despairingly.