Frances wanted to read anything which spoke, however indirectly, of Roman Catholic doctrines. If Nina guessed as much, however, she did not impart her surmise to the vigorously orthodox Bertha Tregaskis.
That this discreet reticence had been justified was made superabundantly evident when Mrs. Tregaskis first became aware of the Romanistic tendencies of her ward.
“People of seventeen must do what they’re told,” she said serenely, but with an undercurrent of severity. “When you’re one-and-twenty, Francie, we’ll talk about it again, and meanwhile I strongly advise you not to think about the subject. You are much too young to decide such a matter without knowing a great deal more about it, and from your own showing all this simply arises from restlessness and desire for excitement. Religion is too serious a matter to be played with, my dear little girl.”
A certain look of flintlike impenetrability came over Frances’ young face as she looked at her guardian, and she said nothing more. But Mrs. Tregaskis was much too acute to suppose that her silence denoted submission.
“Take her to London,” growled Frederick, when his wife, in her perplexity, put the case before him. “You ought to get her away from that silly woman’s influence.”
Bertha did not ask “What silly woman?” since she rightly recognized that her husband thus denoted her dearest friend, but she decided to follow his advice.
“We’ll have a month in London, and see all the sights,” she cried. “Just you and I and Rosamund, Francie, and be regular country cousins, and go to the National Gallery and British Museum, and a theatre or two from the dress-circle. Never mind about planting the bulbs, dear—no, I don’t mind leaving them to Grant, and the garden must just get on without me for a week or two.”
She stifled a sigh heroically.
“This trip is absolutely for the sake of the girls,” she told Nina Severing. “Neither of them takes any natural healthy interest in gardening or in the animals and things, as Hazel used to do, so I must try what London will do for them. Really, girls are a problem.”
“Nothing to a boy,” sighed Nina. “There’s Morris wandering half over Europe, in the most unsatisfactory manner, pretending that he is studying languages, and really doing nothing at all except loaf. I’ve told him he ought to come back and look after the place in earnest, but he makes one excuse after another——”