“Frances will take you, and show you all that there is to be seen. I know you will forgive me for not undertaking the stairs oftener than I can help,” said her hostess with a little hesitation.
“But of course!”
Nina followed her guide with a graceful gesture expressive of complete understanding.
“Ludovic!” cried Lady Argent in a distraught manner, as soon as he had carefully closed the door. “I am afraid it was really very wrong of me to tell such a shocking untruth, though I did not say in so many words that it would bring on my asthma if I went upstairs to the chapel, but I am sure that is what she understood me to mean, and the worst of it is that I meant her to take it that way, and that is really just the same thing as telling a downright lie. Because of course stairs never affect me in the least, as you very well know, only damp, which the chapel is far from being, especially with that dear little radiator put in under Our Lady’s statue. Oh, my dear boy, do you think it was very wrong of me?”
“Not in the least. Why should you have taken her to the chapel yourself, tiresome woman that she is?”
“Oh, hush,” said his mother, looking delighted. “Pray don’t call her names, Ludovic, my dear, it really is most uncharitable. But I am dreadfully afraid that I have taken a terrible dislike to her.”
“What! When she is so much interested in Catholicism?” asked Ludovic, with a shade of derision in his tone.
“I did not like her manner about the Church at all,” said Lady Argent with melancholy emphasis. “I really did not, Ludovic. I have no doubt that it is very uncharitable of me, but it positively struck me once or twice that she was almost posing about it all. So unlike dear little Frances, who is so much in earnest.”
“I believe it was Mrs. Severing who first put the idea of Catholicism into her head, all the same,” said Ludovic rather maliciously.
“My dear boy, how can you say such a thing! It was the grace of God, neither more nor less, and when you consider that Mrs. Grantham was a Catholic herself, by birth!—though I’m sure I had no idea of such a thing till just the other day: but then one was so dreadfully apt to look upon all foreigners as belonging to some odd fancy religion, or even nothing at all, in those days. And, of course, poor thing, she must have given up her religion altogether, or those children would never have been baptized Protestants, poor little things, when you think of the promises the non-Catholic party to a marriage always has to make—but I suppose Mr. Grantham was never even told about them, let alone asked to make them.”