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Worship was even then, I suppose, a necessity of her nature, and, her chief altar veiled, her mind was in process of becoming a pantheon, in which Jane Eyre and Jephthah’s daughter, Mary Stuart and Napoleon (it shocked her intensely that Gran’papa could refer to him familiarly as ‘Boney’) shared incense with Wamba son of Witless, and Admiral Byng, and poor Arachne, who did sew better than Minerva anyhow! For Laura’s gods were generally selected for their misfortunes’ sake. She had the instinct for lost causes: would always be the loyalest of rebels. Indeed her early and equal passion for John Milton and Marie Corelli was occasioned by the fact that here, at least, were two who could appreciate a poor devil’s good points. If Laura could have had Providence under her orders for but one busy hour, how topsy-turvily perfect the world would have rolled on again, with never a discrowned king nor a carrotless donkey nor a motherless eight-year-old in all its boundaries. Her baby sorrows had intensified her inborn sympathy with any ill-treated thing, and, as the leaves began to fall in that first lonely autumn, she would fling small, motherly arms round the shivering poplar on the lawn as she passed it, and hug it and warm it, with defiant glances at the comfortable fir trees and well-dressed laurels: would rescue dying flowers from the bonfire, and worms from the birds, and birds from the pussy-cat: and when she found a tell-tale hole and a nibbled book in Gran’papa’s bookshelf she was quite as anxious as the mouse to preserve the secret. Can you see Laura, Collaborator, breathing heavily with excitement, eye and ear cocked against detection, guiltily dropping stolen cheese down that mouse’s tunnel before she corked it up and turned with equally eager sympathy to the smoothing of the poor torn book, and so, incidentally, to her reward? For in that brown, ancient book, with its long s’s and its wood-cuts and its map, she found the information that neither Gran’papa nor Nurse nor Aunt Adela would give her, nothing more or less than a definite description of her mother’s new home, and full directions as to how Laura was to get there.