"Won't you have your breakfast, Laura? You know it's here--on my tray."

Laura turned, and Augustina to her infinite relief saw not frowns, but a
face all radiance.

"I've been watching the lambs in the field across the river. Such
ridiculous enchanting things!--such jumps--and affectations. And the
river's heavenly--and all the general _feel_ of it! I really don't know,
Augustina, how you ever came to leave this country when you'd once been
born in it."

Mrs. Fountain pushed away her tray, shook her head sadly, and said
nothing.

"What is it?--and who is it?" cried Laura, standing amazed before a
picture in the drawing-room at Bannisdale.

In front of her, on the panelled wall, hung a dazzling portrait of a girl
in white, a creature light as a flower under wind; eyes upraised and
eager, as though to welcome a lover; fair hair bound turban-like with a
white veil; the pretty hands playing with a book. It shone from the brown
wall with a kind of natural sovereignty over all below it and around it,
so brilliant was the picture, so beautiful the woman.

Augustina looked up drearily. She was sitting shrunk together in a large
chair, deep in some thoughts of her own.

"That's our picture--the famous picture," she explained slowly.