“My dear Nina! It’s really too funny to hear you quoting Scripture. Or is it only some mystical poet of the new set? Anyhow, poor Sybil Argent has been a Romanist for some years now, I fancy, and of course one wouldn’t say anything about it, though I quite expect to have it all poured out to me—my friends have the quaintest knack of confiding in me. I rather fancy I know more secrets than most people.”
“That comes of always having your eyes and ears open,” declared Nina with playful sweetness, “instead of keeping your head in the clouds, as I’m afraid mine too often is.”
“I shall have to tell you not to get the stares, as I do the children when they sit gaping at vacancy,” pleasantly replied her friend, and took her departure under this agreeable analogy.
“Poor dear Nina’s affectation of mysticism is really too absurd,” she told herself, and added quite illogically: “No wonder Francie is infected by it. It will be a comfort to talk to a rational woman again—which I suppose Sybil still is, in spite of having allowed herself to be bitten by the Romanist craze.”
But Mrs. Tregaskis was not destined to probe the measure of her friend’s rationality. Lady Argent had already left London when she arrived, and she was obliged to be content with inviting Ludovic Argent to dinner.
“Can you remember him, Rosamund?” she inquired with kindly interest.
“Of course,” curtly retorted her ward, with the offended intonation which implied that Cousin Bertie had forgotten the number of Rosamund’s years.
“We weren’t so very little when we went over to Lady Argent’s,” apologetically said Frances. “I was nine, and I can remember her and the son quite well.”
“Of course,” said her guardian. “I wonder if he will have forgotten you.”
Ludovic had not forgotten Rosamund and Frances. He looked forward curiously to seeing what the years had made of the little girl whom he had found crouching outside the door of the library.