pounds; but the feverish strain that belongs to such a situation as the
Helbecks' awoke in him a new and sharp pity. He was very sorry for the
little, harassed creature; that physical privation should touch a woman
had always seemed to him a monstrosity.

What was the brother about?--a great strong fellow by all accounts,
capable, surely, of doing something for the family fortunes.
Instinctively Fountain held him responsible for the sister's fatigue and
delicacy. They had just lost their mother, and Augustina had come to
Potter's Beach to recover from long months of nursing. And presently
Fountain discovered that what stood between her and health was not so
much the past as the future.

"You don't like the idea of going home," he said to her once, abruptly,
after they had grown intimate. She flushed, and hesitated; then her eyes
filled with tears.

Gradually he made her explain herself. The brother, it appeared, was
twelve years younger than herself, and had been brought up first at
Stonyhurst, and afterwards at Louvain, in constant separation from the
rest of the family. He had never had much in common with his home, since,
at Stonyhurst, he had come under the influence of a Jesuit teacher, who,
in the language of old Helbeck, had turned him into "a fond sort of
fellow," swarming with notions that could only serve to carry the family
decadence a step further.

"We have been Catholics for twenty generations," said Augustina, in her
quavering voice. "But our ways--father's ways--weren't good enough for
Alan. We thought he was making up his mind to be a Jesuit, and father was
mad about it, because of the old place. Then father died, and Alan came