“Probably not,” agreed her son placidly.
“Dreadful to think of! And so poor Mrs. Grantham died without the Last Sacraments or anything at all. If one had only known in those days! However,” said Lady Argent, wisely putting the past away from her, “God has His own ways of doing things, and I have no doubt that Frances is His chosen instrument for many things—perhaps she may even bring dear Bertie herself into the Church, one of these days.”
“And Mrs. Severing, mother?”
“Ludovic! I can’t bear to think of that woman’s first Confession. I can see her, keeping the poor priest for hours in the confessional, while she forced all her fancies down his throat,” said Lady Argent, with the energy that only a really good woman can put into denunciation.
“Mother!”
“Well, my dear boy, I dare say it is very wrong of me to say so, and if I am giving you scandal I am sorry for it. You know very well that I would never say such a thing before the servants or anybody, though what Charles must have thought of her at luncheon, calling the turbot symbolical and everything, I really don’t know. She will have to have tea before driving all that way back, but pray ring the bell and let me order it half an hour earlier.”
This inhospitable manœuvre had hardly been put into execution before Frances and Nina reappeared. The latter laid her slender, gloveless hand for a moment on Lady Argent’s sleeve, the blackness of which formed an admirable foil to extreme whiteness and the flash of diamonds, and said in tones which almost suggested an emotional tremolo:
“I can’t thank you enough. It’s been a revelation—Coram sanctissimum!”
Ludovic, with some perspicacity, divined that Mrs. Severing supposed her fragment of Latinity to be some recondite version of “sanctum sanctorum,” and tried to look proportionately gratified, the more so as his mother’s expression denoted considerable distrust mingled with a most perfunctory politeness.
“I’m so glad,” she murmured doubtfully. “Do pray let me give you some tea—they are just bringing it.”