Potter's Beach as a watering-place was neither beautiful nor amusing.
Laura was happy there, but that said nothing. All her childhood through,
she had the most surprising gift for happiness. From morning till night
she lived in a flutter of delicious nothings. Unless he watched her
closely, Stephen Fountain could not tell for the life of him what she was
about all day. But he saw that she was endlessly about something; her
little hands and legs never rested; she dug, bathed, dabbled, raced,
kissed, ate, slept, in one happy bustle, which never slackened except for
the hours when she lay rosy and still in her bed. And even then the
pretty mouth was still eagerly open, as though sleep had just breathed
upon its chatter for a few charmed moments, and "the joy within" was
already breaking from the spell.

Stephen Fountain adored her, but his affections were never enough for
him. In spite of the child's spirits he himself found Potter's Beach a
desolation, all the more that he was cut off from his books for a time by
doctor's orders and his own common sense. Suddenly, as he took his daily
walk over the sands with Laura, he began to notice a thin lady in black,
sitting alone under a bank of sea-thistles, and generally struggling with
an umbrella which she had put up to shelter herself and her book from a
prevailing and boisterous wind. Sometimes when he passed her in the
little street, he caught a glimpse of timid eyes, or he saw and pitied
the slight involuntary jerk of the head and shoulders, which seemed to
tell of nervous delicacy. Presently they made friends, and he found her
lonely and discontented like himself. She was a Catholic, he discovered;
but her Catholicism was not that of the convert, but of an old inherited
sort which sat easily enough on a light nature. Then, to his
astonishment, it appeared that she lived with a brother at an old house
in North Lancashire--a well-known and even, in its degree, famous
house--which lay not seven miles distant from his grandfather's little