"The plainest thing I can find," said Laura indifferently. "Unless Augustina teases me into something I don't want." Polly inquired if it would be in church. "In a Catholic church," said Laura with a shrug. "No flowers—no music. They just let you be married—that's all."
Polly's-eyes jumped with amazement. "Why, I thowt they had everything so grand!"
"Not if you will go and marry a heretic like me," said Laura. "Then they make you know your place."
"But—but Laura! yo're to be a Romanist too—for sure?" cried Polly in bewilderment.
"Do you think so?" said Laura. Her eyes sparkled. She was sitting on the edge of the stile, one small foot dangling. Polly's rustic sense was once more vaguely struck by the strange mingling in the little figure of an extreme, an exquisite delicacy with some tough, incalculable element. Miss Fountain's soft lightness seemed to offer no more resistance than a daffodil on its stalk. But approach her!—whether it was poor Hubert, or even——?
Polly looked and spoke her perplexity. She let Laura know that Miss Fountain's conversion was assumed at Browhead Farm. Through her blundering though not unkindly talk, Laura gradually perceived indeed a score of disagreeable things. Mrs. Mason and her fanatical friend, Mr. Bayley, were both persuaded—so it seemed—that Miss Fountain had set her cap at the Squire from the beginning, ready at a moment's notice to swallow the Scarlet Lady when required. And Catholic and Protestant alike were kind enough to say that she had made use of her cousin to draw on Mr. Helbeck. The neighbourhood, in fact, held her to be a calculating little minx, ripe for plots and Papistry, or anything else that might suit a daring game.
The girl gradually fell silent. Her head drooped. Her eyes looked at Polly askance and wistfully. She did not defend herself; but she showed the wound.
"Well, I'm sorry you don't understand," she said at last, while her voice trembled. "Perhaps you will some day. I don't know. Anyway, will you please tell Cousin Elizabeth that I'm not going to be a Catholic? Perhaps that will comfort her a little."
"But howiver are you goin to live wi Mr. Helbeck then?" asked Polly. Her loud surprise conveyed the image of Helbeck as it lay graven in the minds of the Browhead circle,—a sort of triple-crowned, black-browed tyrant, with all the wiles and torments of Rome in his pocket. A wife resist—defy? The Church knows how to deal with naughtiness of that kind.
Laura laughed.