Augustina pursued him with fretful inquiries and surmises. Helbeck, pale and gloomy, threw himself down on the settle, and produced the story of the accident, so far as the garrulous and incoherent Polly had enabled him to understand it. Fresh wails on Augustina's part. What a horrible, horrible thing! Why, of course the child was terribly upset--hurt perhaps--or she would never have been so foolish about the trains. And now one could not even be sure that she had found a place to sleep in! She would come home a wreck--a simple wreck. Helbeck moved uneasily. "She was not hurt, according to Miss Mason." "I suppose young Mason saw her off?" "I suppose so." "What were they all about, to make such a blunder?" Helbeck shrugged his shoulders, and at last he succeeded in quieting his sister, by dint of a resolute suppression of all but the most ordinary and comforting suggestions. "Well, after all, thank goodness, Laura has a great deal of common sense--she always had," said Mrs. Fountain, with a clearing countenance. "Of course. She will be here, I have little doubt, before you are ready for your breakfast. It is unlucky, but it should not disturb your night's rest. Please go to bed." With some difficulty he drove her there. Augustina retired, but it was to spend a broken and often tearful night. Alan might say what he liked--it was all most disagreeable. Why!--would the inn take her in? Mrs. Fountain had often been told that an inn, a respectable inn, required a trunk as well as a person. And Laura had not even a bag--positively not a hand-bag. A reflection which was the starting-point of a hundred new alarms, under which poor Mrs. Fountain tossed till the morning. * * * * * Meanwhile Helbeck went to his study. It was nearly one o'clock when he entered it, but the thought of sleep never occurred to him. He took out of his pocket the telegram from Braeside, re-read it, and destroyed it. So Mason was with her--for of course it was Mason. Not one word of such a conjunction was to be gathered from the sister. She had clearly supposed that Laura would start alone and arrive alone. Or was she in the plot? Had Mason simply arranged the whole "mistake," jumped into the same train with her, and confronted her at the junction? Helbeck moved blindly up and down the room, traversed by one of those storms of excitement to which the men of his stock were liable. The thought of those two figures leaving the Braeside station together at midnight roused in him a madness half jealousy, half pride. He saw the dainty head, the cloud of gold under the hat, the pretty gait, the girlish waist, all the points of delicacy or charm he had worshipped through his pain these many weeks. To think of them in the mere neighbourhood of that coarse and sensual lad had always been profanation. And now who would not be free to talk, to spatter her girlish name? The sheer unseemliness of such a kinship!--such a juxtaposition.