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Updated: June 14, 2025
They shut themselves in to read it, expecting one of those letters, those unsuspicious letters of every day, which sudden death leaves behind it. But this was what they read: "Dear, dear friend, Last night, nearly five hours ago, I promised for the second time to marry Mr. Helbeck, and I promised, too, that I would be a Catholic. I asked him to procure for me Catholic teaching and instruction.
The paternal note in the words was more than official. He was a widower, and had lost his wife and infant daughter two years before his entrance into the Church of Rome. Helbeck smiled. "I assure you Miss Fountain spends none of her pity upon herself." "I dare say more than you think. The position of the unbeliever in a house like yours is always a painful one. You see she is alone.
The craving for the bare rooms of Bannisdale possessed her for that shadow-happiness of entering his house as he quitted it walking its old boards unknown to him touching the cushions and chairs in Augustina's room that he would touch, perhaps that very same night, or on the morrow! Till Augustina's death. Then both for Laura and for Helbeck an Unknown before which the girl shut her eyes.
"Not before you know who I am!" said Laura, still laughing "I'm Laura Fountain. Now do you know?" "What Stephen Fountain's daughter as married Miss Helbeck?" said the young man in wonder. His face, which had been at first vague and heavy with sleep, began to recover its natural expression. Laura surveyed him. He had a square, full chin and an upper lip slightly underhung.
Helbeck, I wish to tell the truth, and I ought to tell it! And your arguments have no weight with me whatever." But he had made them prevail. And she had not punished him too severely. A little more pallor, a little more silence for a time that was all! A score of poignant recollections laid hold upon him as he paced the night away.
It makes its own atmosphere. He can laugh I have seen it myself! but it is an event." As Lent went on, the mingling of curiosity and cool criticism with which Miss Fountain regarded her surroundings became perhaps more apparent. Father Leadham, in particular, detected the young lady's fasting experiments. He spoke of them to Helbeck as showing a lack of delicacy and good taste.
The love scene which ensues on that early summer morning when Helbeck discovers the "wild pagan" girl, as he thought her, in a state bordering on exhaustion, after her long walk across country through half the night, is a very beautiful and touching one, and reveals all the mastery which the authoress commands of the language and mystery of the emotions.
But meanwhile he knew well, in his sinful and shrinking mind, that, for that night at least, he was only praying because he could do nothing else nothing that would give him Laura, or deliver him from the fears that shook his inmost being. A little before six Helbeck left the chapel. He must bathe and dress then to the farm for the pony cart.
Letty laughed, fenced with the question for four days, during which George was never dull for a single instant, and then capitulated. She allowed him to propose to her, and was graciously pleased to accept him. The following week Tressady went down with Letty to her home at Helbeck.
Other girls, it seemed, married Catholics and made nothing of it agreed pleasantly to differ all their lives. Her heart cried out! There could be no likeness between these Catholic husbands and Alan Helbeck. In the first days of their engagement she had often said to herself: "I need have nothing to do with it!" or "Some things are so lovely! I will only think of them."
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