Augustina knitted with all her might for a few minutes, and then looked up.
"Don't you think," she said, with a timid change of tone--"don't you think, dear, you might go to Cambridge for a few weeks? I am sure the Friedlands would take you in. You would come in for all the parties, and--and you needn't trouble about me. Sister Angela's niece could come and stay here for a few weeks. The Reverend Mother told me so."
"Sister Angela suggested that? Thank you, I won't have my plans settled for me by Sister Angela. If you and Mr. Helbeck want to turn me out, why, of course I shall go."
Augustina held out her hands in terror at the girl's attitude and voice.
"Laura, don't say such things! As if you weren't an angel to me! As if I could bear the thought of anybody else!"
A quiver ran through Laura's features. "Well, then, don't bear it," she said, kneeling down again beside her stepmother. "You look quite ill and excited, Augustina. I think we'll keep the Reverend Mother out in future. Won't you lie down and let me cover you up?"
So it ended for the time--with physical weakness on Augustina's part, and caresses on Laura's.
But when she was alone, Miss Fountain sat down and tried to think things out.
"What are the Sisters meddling for? Do they find me in their way? I'm flattered! I wish I was. Well!--is drunkenness the worst thing in the world?" she asked herself deliberately. "Of course, if it goes beyond a certain point it is like madness--you must keep out of its way, for your own sake. But papa used to say there were many things a great deal worse. So there are!--meanness, and shuffling with truth for the sake of your soul. As for the other tales, I don't believe them. But if I did, I am not going to marry him!"
She felt herself very wise. In truth, as Stephen Fountain had realised with some anxiety before his death, among Laura's many ignorances, none was so complete or so dangerous as her ignorance of all the ugly ground facts that are strewn round us, for the stumbling of mankind. She was as determined not to know them, as he was invincibly shy of telling them.
For the rest, her reflections represented, no doubt, many dicta that in the course of her young life she had heard from her father. To Stephen Fountain the whole Christian doctrine of sin was "the enemy"; and the mystical hatred of certain actions and habits, as such, was the fount of half the world's unreason.