Sir Isumbras at the Ford

by D. K. Broster

"'Raymonde,'" said the Bishop.

It was no coup manqué this time. The little mother gazed at him thunderstruck, amazement, incredulity, and something that might almost have been a strangled joy chasing each other over her fragile countenance.

"'Raymonde'?" she repeated. "I . . . it cannot be . . . I know no one of that name!"

"But evidently your son does, Madame," suggested His Grandeur, unable to restrain the phantom of a smile. "It was the only time I ever heard him mention it. He seemed to be beseeching this 'Raymonde' to come to him."

Mme. de la Vireville had no words. Nor had she tears now; her astonishment had dried them. She stared at Monseigneur, who stood there with the bright aconite flower in his pale old hands, which were folded across the purple sash showing between the folds of his cloak, and she said nothing.

"Your experience of the world, my daughter," went on the Bishop, "must have taught you that even the most devoted son does not always confide everything to his mother. In this case, doubtless, the time was not ripe."

The time, however, did seem to him ripe to leave this mother to reflect on the information that he had just given her, and, the sound of a clock striking noon issuing most appositely at this moment from the house, he seized the opportunity to add:

"If you will excuse me, Madame, for a few moments? I must say my office."

And pulling out his shabby breviary he went off down the path in a manner more than diplomatic, for he had said Sext before ever Mme. de la Vireville came into the garden. However, one can always get ahead with advantage.

But when a conviction of ten years' growth—one, moreover, which you have just been stoutly affirming with your own lips—is as suddenly felled as was Mme. de la Vireville's about her son, it is natural to find its collapse somewhat devastating. Fortuné's mother, hardly aware that Monseigneur had left her, stood beside the snowdrops, certainly more engrossed than was Monseigneur himself at the other end of the path—and the antiphon to her Hours was a name she had never heard before.