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His thoughts fell back to Stephen Fountain, cursing an influence at once so intangible and so strong. It was some relief that they were in no risk of tete-a-tete outside Augustina's sick room. One or other of the nurses was always present at meals. And on the day after Laura's arrival Father Leadham appeared and stayed for ten days.
Don't I know that I'm the ornariest, meanest old skinflint atween Point Sal and San Diego? That's me, and I'm proud of it. I aim to let the hull world stew in its own juice. The folks in these yere foothills need thinnin' anyway. Halloa! What in thunder's this?" Through the door, which we had left ajar, very timidly, all blushes and dimples, and sucking one small thumb, came Sissy Leadham.
So that, where others saw defection from a high ideal and danger to his own Catholic position, he, with hidden passion, and very few words of explanation even to his director, Father Leadham, felt the drawing of a heavenly force, the promise of an ultimate and joyful issue. Upon his fidelity now and here, not only his own eternal fate, but Laura's, might depend.
"Aye the diphtheria! You are rich, Mr. Spooner; you can follow your cattle into a healthier country than this. My advice to you is Get!" The old man stared; then he slid off the barrel and shambled out of the store as little Sissy Leadham entered it. The child looked curiously at Andrew Spooner. "What's the matter with Pap?" she asked, shrilly.
After High Mass on Easter Sunday Helbeck walked home from Whinthorpe alone, as his companion Father Leadham had an engagement in the town. Through the greater part of Holy Week the skies had been as grey and penitential as the season.
Once or twice he let himself imagine the capture of her little struggling soul, the break-down of her childish resistance, and felt the flooding of a joy, at once mystical and very human. But that natural chivalry and deep self-distrust he had once expressed to Father Leadham kept him in check; made him very slow and scrupulous.
The meaning was conveyed by a look an inflection hardly a phrase. But Laura understood it perfectly; and when Father Leadham returned to Mrs. Fountain he guiltily knew what he had done, and, being a man in general of great tact and finesse, he hardly knew whom to blame most, himself, or the girl who had imperceptibly and yet deeply provoked him.
Little Augustina, full of a pleading, an apostolic strength, looked at her tenderly. "He hardly sleeps, Laura. As I lie awake, I hear him moving about at all hours. I said to Father Leadham the other day 'his heart is broken. When you take him, he will be able to do what you tell him, perhaps. But for this world it will be like a dead man. And Father Leadham did not deny it. He knows it is true."
Father Leadham, for instance whose letters had been his chief support during a period of dumb agony when he had felt himself more than once on the brink of some morbid trouble of brain. "I found her adamant," said Father Leadham. "Never was I so powerless with any human soul. She would not discuss anything. She would only say that she was born in freedom and free she would remain.
He's down in Skye, and we keep them till there's enough to fill the sack. 'Do they go by post, Mr Leadham? 'Not by post, Lady Carbury. There are not many of them would pay the expense. We send them by long sea to Glasgow, because just at this time of the year there is not much hurry. We can't publish before the winter. Oh, heavens!
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