Suddenly there was a sound. The handle of the drawing-room turned. "Why, you are dark in here!" said Augustina. "What a wretched light that lamp gives!" At the same moment the heavy curtain over the oriel window was drawn to one side, and a light figure entered the room. The Jesuit made a step backwards. "Laura!" cried Helbeck in bewilderment. "Where have you come from?" "I was in the window watching the moon rise. Didn't you know?" She walked up to him, and without hesitation she did what she had never yet done before a spectator: she slipped her little hand into his. He looked down upon her, rather pale, his lips moving. Then withdrawing his hand, he quietly and proudly put his arm round her. She accepted the movement with equal pride, and without a word. Augustina looked at them with discomfort--coughed, fumbled with her spectacles, and began to hunt for her knitting. The Jesuit, whiter and sicklier than before, murmured that he would go and rest after his journey, and with eyes steadily cast down he walked away. "I don't wonder!" thought Augustina, in an inward heat; "they really are too demonstrative!" That night for the first time since her arrival at Bannisdale, Laura, instead of saying good-night as soon as the clock reached a quarter to ten, quietly walked beside Augustina to the chapel. She knelt at some distance from Helbeck. But when the prayers, which were read by Mr. Williams, were over, and the tiny congregation was leaving the chapel, she felt herself drawn back. Helbeck did not speak, but in the darkness of the corridor he raised her hands and held them long against his lips. She quickly escaped from him, and without another word to anyone she was gone. But an hour or two later, as she lay wakeful in her room above the study, she still heard the sound of continuous voices from below. Helbeck and the scholastic!--plunged once more in that common stock of recollections and interests in which she had no part, linked and reconciled through all difference by that Catholic freemasonry of which she knew nothing. The impertinent zeal of the evening--the young man's ill manners and hypocrisies--would be soon forgiven. In some ways Mr. Helbeck was more Jesuit than the Jesuits. He would not only excuse the audacity--was she quite sure that in his inmost heart he would not shrink before the warning? "What chance have I?" she cried, in a sudden despair; and she wept long and miserably, oppressed by new terrors, new glimpses, as it were, of some hard or chilling reality that lay waiting for her in the dim corridors of life. * * * * * Next morning after breakfast, Helbeck and Mr. Williams disappeared. A light scaffolding had been placed in the chapel. Work was to begin.