But Laura was not affected by this fact in the least. She put away the suggestions of it with impatience. Her father had not been so. Now that she had lost her lover, she clung the more fiercely to her father. And there had been no anodynes for him. ... Oh if the sun--the useless sun--would only go--and Cousin Elizabeth would come back--and bring that letter! Yes, one little pale joy there was still--for a few weeks or months. 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. * * * * * There was company that night in the farm kitchen. Mr. Bayley, the more than evangelical curate, came to tea. He was a little man, with a small sharp anaemic face buried in red hair. It was two or three years of mission work, first in Mexico, and then at Lima as the envoy of one of the most thoroughgoing of Protestant societies, that had given him his strangely vivid notions of the place of Romanism among the world's forces. At no moment in this experience can he have had a grain of personal success. Lima, apparently, is of all towns in the universe the town where the beard of Protestantism is least worth the shaving--to quote a northern proverb. At any rate, Mr. Bayley returned to his native land at fifty with a permanent twist of brain. Hence these preposterous sermons in the fell chapel; this eager nosing out and tracking down of every scent of Popery; this fanatical satisfaction in such a kindred soul as that of Elizabeth Mason. Some mild Ritualism at Whinthorpe had given him occupation for years; and as for Bannisdale, he and the Masons between them had raised the most causeless of storms about Mr. Helbeck and his doings, from the beginning; they had kept up for years the most rancorous memory of the Williams affair; they had made the owner of the old Hall the bogey of a country-side. Laura knew it well. She never spoke to the little red man if she could help it. What pleased her was to make Daffady talk of him--Daffady, whose contempt as a "Methody" for "paid priests" made him a sure ally. "Why, he taaks i' church as thoo God Awmighty were on the pulpit stairs--gi-en him his worrds!" said the cow-man, with the natural distaste of all preachers for diatribes not their own; and Laura, when she wandered the fields with him, would drive him on to say more and worse.