“Papa,” I cried to him, “will you send Miss Reinhart away?  No other change is of any use.”

“My dear Laura, you are prejudiced.  You must not listen to those stupid servants and their vile exaggerations.  Miss Reinhart is very good and very useful to me.  I cannot send her away as I would dismiss a servant—­nor do I intend.”

“Let her go, that we may be happy as we were before.  Oh, papa! she does not love mamma.  She is not good; every one dislikes her.  No one will speak to her.  What shall we do?  Send her away!”

“This is all a mistake, Laura,” he said; “a cruel—­I might say wicked—­mistake.  You must not talk to me in this way again.”

Perhaps more might have been said; it might even have been that the tragedy had been averted but for the sudden rap at the door and the announcement that the rector wished to see Sir Roland.

“Ask him to step in here,” said my father, with a great mark of discomposure.  “Laura, run away, child, and remember what I have said.  Do not speak to me in this fashion again.”

I learned afterward that the rector had called to remonstrate with him—­to tell him what a scandal and shame was spreading all over the country side, and to beg of him to end it.

Many hours elapsed before I saw my father again.  I saw him ride out of the courtyard and did not see him return.  When I had gone to his room in the morning I had taken with me one of my books, and I wanted it for my studies in the morning.

It was neither light nor dark.  I went quietly along the broad corridors to my father’s study.  I never gave one thought to the fact that my father might be there.  I had not seen him return.  I went in.  The study was a very long room with deep windows.  Quite at the other end, with the firelight shining on his face, stood my father, and by his side Miss Reinhart, just as I had seen him stand with my beautiful mother a hundred times; one arm was thrown round her, and he was looking earnestly in her face.

“It must be so,” he said; “there is no alternative now.”

She clung to him, whispering, and he kissed her.

I stole away.  Oh! my injured, innocent mother.  I do not remember exactly what I did.  I rushed from the house out into the great fir wood and wept out my hot, rebellious anger and despair there.  At breakfast time the next morning just a gleam of hope came to me.  Miss Reinhart said that, above everything else, she should like a drive.

Whether it was my pleading and tears or the rector’s visit which had made my father think, I cannot tell, but for the first time he seemed quite unwilling to drive her out.  The tears came into her eyes and he went over to her and whispered something which made her smile.  He talked to her in a mysterious kind of fashion that I could neither understand nor make out at all—­of some time in the future.

An uneasy sense of something about to happen came over me.  I could feel the approach of some dark shadow; all day the same sensation rested with me, yet I saw nothing to justify it.  At night my mother called me to her side.