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Updated: June 14, 2025
Bayley, after the street fight, had met Mr. Helbeck at a workhouse meeting and had placed his hands behind his back when Mr. Helbeck offered his own, Laura tossed her head. "What a ridiculous man!" she said disdainfully; "what can it matter to Mr. Helbeck whether Mr. Bayley shakes hands with him or not?" Polly looked at her in some astonishment, and dropped the subject.
The girl had caught the remark as she and her stepmother turned the corner of the dense beechen hedge that, with openings to each point of the compass, enclosed the bowling-green. Presently Helbeck, stopping to take breath in a game of which he had been the life, caught sight of the slim figure against the red-brown of the hedge.
In Helbeck the shock of Laura's October flight had worked with profound and transforming power. After those first desperate days in which he had merely sought to recover her, to break down her determination, or to understand if he could the grounds on which she had acted, a new conception of his own life and the meaning of it had taken possession of him.
You don't know where that is. But Mr. Helbeck knows." The nurse glanced at her, and wondered. Miss Fountain, no doubt, had been dazed a little by the sudden shock. She had learnt, however, not to interfere with the first caprices of grief, and she did not try to dissuade the girl from going. When the flowers were all laid, Laura went round to the further side of the bed and dropped on her knees.
She had seen the figure of a man crossing the park on the further side of the river, and the maidenly instinct drove her from the window; though the man in question was perhaps a quarter of a mile away, and had he been looking for her, could not possibly have made out more than a pale speck on the old wall. "Mr. Helbeck," she thought "by the height of him.
She was very small and slight, and her hair made a spot of pale gold against the oak panelling of the walls. Helbeck noticed the slenderness of her arms, and the prettiness of her little white neck, then the freedom of her quick gesture as she went up to the elder lady and with a certain peremptoriness began to loosen her cloak.
"When I think what has been granted to us since I was here last!" she said to the priest as they moved on, clasping her hands, and flushing. "The dear Bishop took such trouble about it," he said in a little murmuring voice. "It was not easy but the Church loves to content her children." Involuntarily Laura glanced at Helbeck.
As far as Helbeck knew, he had spent the rest of the Sunday drinking heavily at Marsland. Since then Laura had received one insolent letter from him, reiterating his own passion for her, attacking Helbeck in the fiercest terms, and prophesying that she would soon be tired of her lover and her bargain.
Besides" his grave face stiffened "in his case there were peculiar difficulties. His art had become a temptation. He wished to protect himself from it." Laura's curiosity was roused; but Helbeck gently put her questions aside, and at last she said in a flash of something like passion that she wondered which the young man had felt most the trampling on his art, or the forsaking his mother.
No doubt her relations were vulgar, low-born folk! but she did not ask Mr. Helbeck or her stepmother to entertain them. At last there had been a passage of arms between her and her stepmother. Perhaps Mr. Helbeck had overheard it, for immediately afterwards he had emerged from his study into the hall, where she and Augustina were sitting.
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