A deep monotonous sound, rising and falling at regular intervals, Mr. Helbeck reading prayers, with the two maids, who represented the only service of the house. Laura lingered with her hand on the door. In the silence of the ancient house, there was something touching in the sound, a kind of appeal. But it was an appeal which, in the girl's mind, passed instantly into reaction. She locked the door, and turned away, breathing fast as though under some excitement. The tears, long held down, were rising, and the room, where a large wood fire was burning,--wood was the only provision of which there was a plenty at Bannisdale,--seemed to her suddenly stifling. She went to the casement window and threw it open. A rush of mild wind came through, and with it, the roar of the swollen river. The girl leant forward, bathing her hot face in the wild air. There was a dark mist of trees below her, trees tossed by the wind; then, far down, a ray of moonlight on water; beyond, a fell-side, clear a moment beneath a sky of sweeping cloud; and last of all, highest of all, amid the clouds, a dim radiance, intermittent and yet steady, like the radiance of moonlit snow. A strange nobility and freedom breathed from the wide scene; from its mere depth below her; from the spacious curve of the river, the mountains half shown, half hidden, the great race of the clouds, the fresh beating of the wind. The north spoke to her and the mountains. It was like the rush of something passionate and straining through her girlish sense, intensifying all that was already there. What was this thirst, this yearning, this physical anguish of pity that crept back upon her in all the pauses of the day and night? It was nine months since she had lost her father, but all the scenes of his last days were still so clear to her that it seemed to her often sheer incredibility that the room, the bed, the helpless form, the noise of the breathing, the clink of the medicine glasses, the tread of the doctor, the gasping words of the patient, were all alike fragments and phantoms of the past,--that the house was empty, the bed sold, the patient gone. Oh! the clinging of the thin hand round her own, the piteousness of suffering--of failure! Poor, poor papa!--he would not say, even to comfort her, that they would meet again. He had not believed it, and so she must not. No, and she would not! She raised her head fiercely and dried her tears. Only, why was she here, in the house of a man who had never spoken to her father--his brother-in-law--for thirteen years; who had made his sister feel that her marriage had been a disgrace; who was all the time, no doubt, cherishing such thoughts in that black, proud head of his, while she, her father's daughter, was sitting opposite to him? "How am I ever going to bear it--all these months?" she asked herself. CHAPTER II