The association made her tremble and catch her breath. It was not all joy--oh! far from it! The sweet common rapture of common love was not hers. Instinctively she felt something in her own lot akin to the wilder and more tragic aspects of this mountain land, to which she had turned from the beginning with a daughter's yearning. Yet the tragedy, if tragedy there were, was all from within, not from without. Augustina--though Laura guessed her mind well enough--complained no more. The marriage was fixed for November; the dispensation from the Bishop had been obtained. No lover could be more ardent, more tender, than Helbeck. Why then this weariness--this overwhelming melancholy that seized her in all her solitary moments? Her nature had lost its buoyancy, its old gift for happiness. The truth was that her will was tired out. Her whole soul thirsted to submit, and yet could not submit. Was it the mere spell of Catholic order and discipline, working upon her own restless and ill-ordered nature? It had so worked, indeed, from the beginning. She could recall--with trembling--many a strange moment in Helbeck's presence, or in the chapel, when she had seemed to feel her whole self breaking up, dissolving in the grip of a power that was at once her foe and the bearer of infinite seduction. But always the will, the self, had won the victory, had delivered a final "_No!_" into which had rushed the whole energy of her being. And now--if it were only possible to crush back that "No"--to beat down this resistance which, like an alien garrison, defended, as it were, a town that hated it; if she could only turn and knock--knock humbly--at that closed door in her lover's life and heart. One touch!--one step! Just as Helbeck could hardly trust himself to think of the joy of conquest, so she shrank bewildered before the fancied bliss of yielding. To what awful or tender things would it admit her! That ebb and flow of mystical emotion she dimly saw in Helbeck, a life within a life;--all that is most intimate and touching in the struggle of the soul--all that strains and pierces the heart--the world to which these belong rose before her, secret, mysterious, "a city not made with hands," now drawing, now repelling. Voices came from it to her that penetrated all the passion and the immaturity of her nature. The mere imagination of what it would mean to surrender herself to Helbeck's teaching in these strange and moving things--what it would be to approach them through the sweetness, the chiding, the training of his love--could shake and unnerve her. What stood in the way? Simply a revolt and repulsion that seemed to be more than and outside herself--something independent and unconquerable, of which she was the mere instrument.