Poor Mrs. Fountain, however, was not happy. She was sitting up in bed, wrapped in an unbecoming flannel jacket--Augustina had no taste in clothes--and looking with an odd repugnance at the very passable breakfast that Laura placed before her. Laura did not quite know what to make of her. In old days she had always regarded her stepmother as an easy-going, rather self-indulgent creature, who liked pleasant food and stuffed chairs, and could be best managed or propitiated through some attention to her taste in sofa-cushions or in tea-cakes. No doubt, since Mrs. Fountain's reconciliation with the Church of her fathers, she had shown sometimes an anxious disposition to practise the usual austerities of good Catholics. But neither doctor nor director had been able to indulge her in this respect, owing to the feebleness of her health. And on the whole she had acquiesced readily enough. But Laura found her now changed and restless. "Oh! Laura, I can't eat all that!" "You must," said Laura firmly. "Really, Augustina, you _must_." "Alan's gone out," said Augustina, with a wistful inconsequence, straining her eyes as though to look through the diamond panes of the window opposite, at the park and the persons walking in it. "Yes. He seems to go to Whinthorpe every morning for Mass. Ellen says he breakfasts with the priest." Augustina sighed and fidgeted. But when she was half-way through her meal, Laura standing over her, she suddenly laid a shaking hand on Laura's arm. "Laura!--Alan's a saint!--he always was--long ago--when I was so blind and wicked. But now--oh! the things Mrs. Denton's been telling me!" "Has she?" said Laura coolly. "Well, make up your mind, Augustina"--she shook her bright head--"that you can't be the same kind of saint that he is--anyway." Mrs. Fountain withdrew her hand in quick offence. "I should be glad if you could talk of these things without flippancy, Laura. When I think how incapable I have been all these years, of understanding my dear brother----" "No--you see you were living with papa," said Laura slowly. She had left her stepmother's side, and was standing with her back to an old cabinet, resting her elbows upon it. Her brows were drawn together, and poor Mrs. Fountain, after a glance at her, looked still more miserable.