Mrs. Friend was sitting in the bow-window of the “Fisherman’s Rest,” a small Welsh inn in the heart of Snowdonia.  The window was open, and a smell of damp earth and grass beat upon Lucy in gusts from outside, carried by a rainy west wind.  Beyond the road, a full stream, white and foaming after rain, was dashing over a rocky bed towards some rapids which closed the view.  The stream was crossed by a little bridge, and beyond it rose a hill covered with oak-wood.  Above the oak-wood and along the road to the right—­mountain forms, deep blue and purple, were emerging from the mists which had shrouded them all day.  The sun was breaking through.  A fierce northwest wind which had been tearing the young leaf of the oak-woods all day, and strewing it abroad, had just died away.  Peace was returning, and light.  The figure of Helena had just disappeared through the oak-wood; Lucy would follow her later.

Behind Mrs. Friend, the walls of the inn parlour were covered deep in sketches of the surrounding scenery—­both oil and water-colour, bad and good, framed and unframed, left there by the artists who haunted the inn.  The room was also adorned by a glass case full of stuffed birds, badly moth-eaten, a book-case containing some battered books mostly about fishing, and a large Visitors’ Book lying on a centre-table, between a Bradshaw and an old guide-book.  Shut up, in winter, the little room would smell intolerably close and musty.  But with the windows open, and a rainy sun streaming in, it spoke pleasantly of holidays for plain hard-working folk, and of that “passion for the beauty flown,” which distils, from the summer hours of rest, strength for the winter to come.

Lucy had let Helena go out alone, of set purpose.  For she knew, or guessed, what Nature and Earth had done for Helena during the month they had passed together in this mountain-land, since that night at Beechmark.  Helena had made no moan—­revealed nothing.  Only a certain paleness in her bright cheek, a certain dreamy habit that Lucy had not before noticed in her; a restlessness at night which the thin partitions of the old inn sometimes made audible, betrayed that the youth in her was fighting its first suffering, and fighting to win.  Lucy had never dared to speak—­still less to pity.  But her love was always at hand, and Helena had repaid it, and the silence it dictated, with an answering love.  Lucy believed—­though with trembling—­that the worst was now over, and that new horizons were opening on the stout soul that had earned them.  But now, as before, she held her peace.

Her diary lay on her lap, and she was thoughtfully turning it over.  It contained nothing but the barest entries of facts.  But they meant a good deal to her, as she looked through them.  Every letter, for instance, from Beechmark had been noted.  Lord Buntingford had written three times to Helena, and twice to herself.  She had seen Helena’s letters; and Helena had read hers.  It seemed