"What! fish and eggs?--that kind of thing?" said Laura. "As if there was any hardship in that!"
"Laura! how can you be so unkind?--I must just keep it all to myself.--I won't tell you anything!" cried Augustina in exasperation.
Laura walked away to the window, and stood looking out at the March buds on the sycamores shining above the river.
"Does he make the servants fast too?" she asked presently, turning her head over her shoulder.
"No, no," said her stepmother eagerly; "he's never hard on them--only to himself. The Church doesn't expect anything more than 'abstinence,' you understand--not real fasting--from people like them--people who work hard with their hands. But--I really believe--they do very much as he does. Mrs. Denton seems to keep the house on nothing. Oh! and, Laura--I really can't be always having extra things!"
Mrs. Fountain pushed her breakfast away from her.
"Please remember--nobody settles anything for themselves--in your Church," said Laura. "You know what that doctor--that Catholic doctor--said to you at Folkestone."
"And as to Mrs. Denton, I see--that explains the manners. No improvement--till Lent's over?"
But her stepdaughter, who was at the window again looking out, paid no heed, and presently Augustina said with timid softness:
"Won't you have your breakfast, Laura? You know it's here--on my tray."
Laura turned, and Augustina to her infinite relief saw not frowns, but a face all radiance.
"I've been watching the lambs in the field across the river. Such ridiculous enchanting things!--such jumps--and affectations. And the river's heavenly--and all the general _feel_ of it! I really don't know, Augustina, how you ever came to leave this country when you'd once been born in it."
Mrs. Fountain pushed away her tray, shook her head sadly, and said nothing.
"What is it?--and who is it?" cried Laura, standing amazed before a picture in the drawing-room at Bannisdale.
In front of her, on the panelled wall, hung a dazzling portrait of a girl in white, a creature light as a flower under wind; eyes upraised and eager, as though to welcome a lover; fair hair bound turban-like with a white veil; the pretty hands playing with a book. It shone from the brown wall with a kind of natural sovereignty over all below it and around it, so brilliant was the picture, so beautiful the woman.