frequently, with a certain timid pretension. Of that habit Fountain, the
fastidious, thought that he should break her. But for the rest, her
religion, her poverty,--well, she had a hundred a year, so that he and
Laura would be no worse off for taking her in, and the child's prospects,
of course, should not suffer by a halfpenny. And as to the Catholicism,
Fountain smiled to himself. No doubt there was some inherited feeling.
But even if she did keep up her little mummeries, he could not see that
they would do him or Laura any harm. And for the rest she suited him. She
somehow crept into his loneliness and fitted it. He was getting too old
to go farther, and he might well fare worse. In spite of her love of
talk, she was not a bad listener; and longer experience showed her to be
in truth the soft and gentle nature that she seemed. She had a curious
kind of vanity which showed itself in her feeling towards her brother.
But Fountain did not find it disagreeable; it even gave him pleasure to
flatter it; as one feeds or caresses some straying half-starved creature,
partly for pity, partly that the human will may feel its power.

"I wonder how much fuss that young man will make?" Fountain asked
himself, when at last it became necessary to write to Bannisdale.

Augustina, however, was thirty-five, in full possession of her little
moneys, and had no one to consult but herself. Fountain enjoyed the
writing of the letter, which was brief, if not curt.

Alan Helbeck appeared without an hour's delay at Potter's Beach. Fountain
felt himself much inclined beforehand to treat the tall dark youth,
sixteen years his junior, as a tutor treats an undergraduate. Oddly
enough, however, when the two men stood face to face, Fountain was once
more awkwardly conscious of that old sense of social distance which the
sister had never recalled to him. The sting of it made him rougher than