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