Helbeck of Bannisdale. Mrs. Humphry Ward

scent first bewrayed them; and as Laura lay gathering with her face among the flowers, she could see behind their gold, and between the hazel stems, the light-filled greys and azures of the mountain distance. Each detail in the happy whole struck on the girl's eager sense and made there a poem of northern spring—spring as the fell-country sees it, pure, cold, expectant, with flashes of a blossoming beauty amid the rocks and pastures, unmatched for daintiness and joy.

      Presently Laura found herself sitting—half crying!—on a mossy tuft, looking along the wood to the distance. What was it in this exquisite country that seized upon her so—that spoke to her in this intimate, this appealing voice?

      Why, she was of it—she belonged to it—she felt it in her veins! Old inherited things leapt within her—or it pleased her to think so. It was as though she stretched out her arms to the mountains and fields, crying to them, "I am not a stranger—draw me to you—my life sprang from yours!" A host of burning and tender thoughts ran through her. Their first effect was to remind her of the farm and of her cousins; and she sprang up, and went back to the cart.

      On they rattled again, downhill through the wood, and up on the further side—still always on the edge of the moss. She loved the villages, and their medley of grey houses wedged among the rocks; she loved the stone farms with their wide porches, and the white splashes on their grey fronts; she loved the tufts of fern in the wall crannies, the limestone ribs and bonework of the land breaking everywhere through the pastures, the incomparable purples of the woods, and the first brave leafing of the larches and the sycamores. Never had she so given her heart to any new world; and through her delight flashed the sorest, tenderest thoughts of her father. "Oh! papa—oh, papa!" she said to herself again and again in a little moan. Every day perhaps he had walked this road as a child, and she could still see herself as a child, in a very dim vision, trotting beside him down the Browhead Road. She turned at last into the fell-gate to which a passing boy directed her, with a long breath that was almost a sob.

      She had given them no notice; but surely, surely they would be glad to see her!

      They? She tried to split up the notion, to imagine the three people she was going to see. Cousin Elizabeth—the mother? Ah! she knew her, for they had never liked Cousin Elizabeth. She herself could dimly remember a hard face; an obstinate voice raised in discussion with her father. Yet it was Cousin Elizabeth who was the Fountain born, who had carried the little family property as her dowry to her husband James Mason. For the grandfather had been free to leave it as he chose, and on the death of his eldest son—who had settled at the farm after his marriage, and taken the heavy work of it off his father's shoulders—the old man had passionately preferred to leave it to the strong, capable granddaughter, who was already provided with a lover, who understood the land, moreover, and could earn and "addle" as he did, rather than to his bookish milksop of a second son, so richly provided for already, in his father's contemptuous opinion, by the small government post at Newcastle.

      "Let us always thank God, Laura, that my grandfather was a brute to yours!" Stephen Fountain would say to his girl on the rare occasions when he could be induced to speak of his family at all. "But for that I might be a hedger and ditcher to this day."

      Well, but Cousin Elizabeth's children? Laura herself had some vague remembrance of them. As the pony climbed the steep lane she shut her eyes and tried hard to recall them. The fair-haired boy—rather fat and masterful—who had taken her to find the eggs of a truant hen in a hedge behind the house—and had pushed her into a puddle on the way home because she had broken one? Then the girl, the older girl Polly, who had cleaned her shoes for her, and lent her a pinafore? No! Laura opened her eyes again—it was no good straining to remember. Too many years had rolled between that early visit and her present self—years during which there had been no communication of any sort between Stephen Fountain and his cousins.

      Why had Augustina been so trying and tiresome about the Masons? Instead of flying to her cousins on the earliest possible opportunity, here was a whole fortnight gone since her arrival, and it was not till this Sunday morning that Laura had been able to achieve her visit. Augustina had been constantly ailing or fretful; either unwilling to be left alone, or possessed by absurd desires for useless trifles, only to be satisfied by Laura's going to shop in Whinthorpe. And such melancholy looks whenever the Masons were mentioned—coupled with so formal a silence on Mr. Helbeck's part! What did it all mean? No doubt her relations were vulgar, low-born folk!—but she did not ask Mr. Helbeck or her stepmother to entertain them. At last there had been a passage of arms between her and her stepmother. Perhaps Mr. Helbeck had overheard it, for immediately afterwards he had emerged from his study into the hall, where she and Augustina were sitting.

      "Miss Fountain—may I ask—do you wish to be sent into Whinthorpe on Sunday morning?"

      She had fronted him at once.

      "No, thank you, Mr. Helbeck. I don't go to church—I never did with papa."

      Had she been defiant? He surely had been stiff.

      "Then, perhaps you would like the pony—for your visit? He is quite at your service for the day. Would that suit you?"

      "Perfectly."

      * * * * *

      So here she was—at last!—climbing up and up into the heart of the fells. The cloud-pageant round the high mountains, the valley with its flashing streams, its distant sands, and widening sea—she had risen as it seemed above them all; they lay beneath her in a map-like unity. She could have laughed and sung out of sheer physical joy in the dancing air—in the play of the cloud gleams and shadows as they swept across her, chased by the wind. All about her the little mountain sheep were feeding in the craggy "intaks" or along the edges of the tiny tumbling streams; and at intervals amid the reds and yellows of the still wintry grass rose great wind-beaten hollies, sharp and black against the blue distance, marching beside her, like scattered soldiers, up the height.

      Not a house to be seen, save on the far slopes of distant hills—not a sound, but the chink of the stone-chat, or the fall of lonely water.

      Soon the road, after its long ascent, began to dip; a few trees appeared in a hollow, then a gate and some grey walls.

      Laura jumped from the cart. Beyond the gate, the road turned downward a little, and a great block of barns shut the farmhouse from view till she was actually upon it.

      But there it was at last—the grey, roughly built house, that she still vaguely remembered, with the whitewashed porch, the stables and cowsheds opposite, the little garden to the side, the steep fell behind.

      She stood with her hand on the pony, looking at the house in some perplexity. Not a soul apparently had heard her coming. Nothing moved in the farmhouse or outside it. Was everybody at church? But it was nearly one o'clock.

      The door under the deep porch had no knocker, and she looked in vain for a bell. All she could do was to rap sharply with the handle of her whip.

      No answer. She rapped again—louder and louder. At last in the intervals of knocking, she became conscious of a sound within—something deep and continuous, like the buzzing of a gigantic bee.

      She put her ear to the door, listening. Then all her face dissolved in laughter. She raised her arm and brought the whip-handle down noisily on the old blistered door, so that it shook again.

      "Hullo!"

      There was a sudden sound of chairs overturned, or dragged along a flagged floor. Then staggering steps—and the door was opened.

      "I say—what's all this—what are you making such a damned noise for?"

      Inside stood a stalwart young man, still half asleep, and drawing his hand irritably across his blinking eyes.

      "How do you do, Mr. Mason?"

      The young man drew himself together with a start. Suddenly he perceived that the young girl standing in the shade of the porch was not his sister, but a stranger. He looked at her with astonishment—at the elegance of her dress, and the neatness of her small gloved hand.

      "I beg your pardon, Miss, I'm sure! Did you want anything?"

      The