rically she falls into his arms, and Helbeck almost
believes the great renunciation is to follow. "His heart beat with a
happiness he had never known before." But he was never farther from
the truth. "It would be a crime--a _crime_ to marry him," the
heart-broken girl sobbed, when she reached the privacy of her own room.

And so she turns her back on Bannisdale. But fate compels her to
return. Her step-mother is dying, and Laura's presence is
indispensable. Once again the old battle is renewed 'twixt love and
creed, and in her anguish this child of the modern world resolves to
force herself to submit that she may save her love. Father Leadham
can, he _must_, convince her. Has he not convinced Protestant
clergymen and other learned people? Why not a poor, untutored girl
such as her? But it was never to be. She was afraid to lose her love,
but there was something in her which conquered fear, and it reasserted
itself at the last. "I told you to make me afraid," she had once said
to Helbeck in one of their sweet moments of reconciliation, "but you
can't! There is something in me that fears nothing, not even the
breaking of both our hearts."

And so, with the awful inevitableness of a Greek tragedy, the action
moves towards the closing doom. It is sad beyond words, and we are
grateful for Mrs. Ward's noble reticence. "The tyrant river that she
loved had received her, had taken life, and then had borne her on its
swirl of waters, straight for that little creek where, once before, it
had tossed a human prey upon the beach. There, beating against the
gravelly bank, in a soft helplessness, her bright hair tangled among
the drift of branch and leaf brought down by the storm, Helbeck found
her."

He carried her home upon his breast, and at the last they laid her
amongst the Westmoreland rocks and trees, in sight of the Bannisdale
woods, in a sweet graveyard, high in the hills. The country folk came
in great numbers, and Helbeck, more estranged than ever now, watched
the mournful scene from afar.

Such is the tragedy of faith and love, which bequeathed to the already
lonely and sorrowful man memories so unspeakably sad, and led this new
Antigone to immolate herself in so awful a manner--"a blind witness to
august things".

For us there remains but one question. Helbeck, it is plain, can never
win Laura, but can Laura ever hope to win Helbeck?

One would have to answer with many distinctions. In the first p