One afternoon Helbeck came out to sit with her. He was no sooner there than she became so restless that he asked her if he should recall Sister Rosa, who had retired to a distant patch of shade. "No--no! Alan, I want to say something. Will you raise my pillow a little?" He did so, and she looked at him for a moment with her haunting blue eyes, without speaking. But at last she said: "Where is Laura?" "Indoors, I believe." "Don't call her. I have been talking to her, Alan, about--about what she means to do." "Did she tell you her plans?" He spoke very calmly, holding his sister's hand. "She doesn't seem to have any. The Friedlands have offered her a home, of course. Alan!--will you put your ear down to me?" He stooped, and she whispered brokenly, holding him several times when he would have drawn back. But at last he released himself. A flush had stolen over his fine and sharpened features. "My dear sister, if it were so--what difference can it make?" He spoke with a quick interrogation. But his glance had an intensity, it expressed a determination, which made her cry out-- "Alan--if she gave way?" "She will _never_ give way. She has more self-control; but her mind is in precisely the same bitter and envenomed state. Indeed, she has grown more fixed, more convinced. The influence of her Cambridge friends has been decisive. Every day I feel for what she has to bear and put up with--poor child!--in this house." "It can't be for long," said Augustina with tears; and she lay for a while, pondering, and gathering force. But presently she made her brother stoop to her again. "Alan--please listen to me! If Laura _did_ become a Catholic--is there anything in the way--anything you can't undo?" He raised himself quickly. He would have suffered these questions from no one else. The stern and irritable temper that he inherited from his father had gained fast upon the old self-control since the events of October. Even now, with Augustina, he was short. "I shall take no vows, dear, before the time. But it would please me--it would console me--if you would put all these things out of your head. I see the will of God very plainly. Let us submit to it." "It hurts me so--to see you suffer!" she said, looking at him piteously. He bent over the grass, struggling for composure. "I shall have something else to do before long," he said in a low voice, "than to consider my own happiness." She was framing another question, when there was a sound of footsteps on the gravel behind them. Augustina exclaimed, with the agitation of weakness, "Don't let any visitors come!" Helbeck looked a moment in astonishment, then his face cleared. "Augustina!--it is the relic--from the Carmelite nuns. I recognise their Confessor." Augustina clasped her hands; and Sister Rosa, obeying Helbeck's signal, came quickly over to her. Mr. Helbeck bared his head and walked over the grass to meet the strange priest, who was carrying a small leather box.