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Updated: June 15, 2025
Like the gentleman he is, he makes no attempt at proselytism, and gives his word that by no speech or act of others shall his future wife be molested. They spend a few weeks at the sea, where Bannisdale and all it represents is forgotten. Laura has grown to love and lean upon this strong, resolute man.
But he was never farther from the truth. "It would be a crime a crime to marry him," the heart-broken girl sobbed, when she reached the privacy of her own room. And so she turns her back on Bannisdale. But fate compels her to return. Her step-mother is dying, and Laura's presence is indispensable.
However, under much persuasion she remained, lamenting; Augustina sent to Bannisdale for her few possessions, and the scanty ceremony was soon over. Meanwhile Laura had but found in the whole affair one more amusement and excitement added to the many that, according to her, Potter's Beach already possessed.
"I told you to make me afraid!" she said mournfully, as she found herself once more upon his breast "but you can't! There is something in me that fears nothing not even the breaking of both our hearts." A week later the Jesuit scholastic Edward Williams arrived at Bannisdale. In Laura his coming roused a curiosity half angry, half feminine, by which Helbeck was alternately harassed and amused.
The sheer unseemliness of such a kinship! such a juxtaposition. If he could only know the true reason of that persistency she had shown about the expedition, in the face of Augustina's wailings, and his own silence? She had been dull Heaven knows she had been dull at Bannisdale, for these two months.
And he would say, too, all that it pleased him to say of that priest-ridden fool at Bannisdale. She seemed so tiny, so fragile a thing as he looked down upon her. An ugly sense of power came to consciousness in him. Coupled with despair, indeed!
In fact, it was little more than a fortnight since Laura had parted from her stepmother, who had shown a piteous unwillingness to go back alone to Bannisdale. The garden door opened and shut; a white-capped servant came along the path. A gentleman for Miss Fountain. "For me?" The girl's cheek flushed involuntarily. "Why, Pater who is it?"
I thought about it next day, all through a long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reached Euston the plot of Helbeck of Bannisdale was more or less clear to me. I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterward. We discussed it, and he cordially encouraged me to work it out.
"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.
She raised her hand to her eyes. "Good-bye," said the inner sense "Good-bye!" And the strange link which from the first moment almost had seemed to exist between that radiant daughter of Bannisdale and herself snapped and fell away, carrying how much else with it! About an hour before Laura's departure there was a loud knock at her door, and Mrs. Denton appeared. The woman was pale with rage. Mrs.
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