“The little shrine!” said Nina with a sort of soft rapture. “It reminded me so much of those little wayside shrines one saw everywhere in Italy. I have always loved them.”
“Do you know Italy well?” asked Ludovic.
“I was there years ago—with my husband. I remember,” said Nina determinedly turning to Lady Argent, “that we had a private audience with the Pope—so interesting, and he was the dearest old man. I shall never forget kneeling there—I was a mere child, I married very, very young—to receive his blessing, and how impressive it all was. He gave me some beads, too, that I am sure have all sorts of beautiful Indulgences attached to them, even for a poor little heretic. Frances knows them—they always hang over my bed at home. I really could hardly sleep without them.”
Even Frances felt no regret when Mrs. Severing took her departure.
Neither she nor Lady Argent alluded to the visit that evening, and Ludovic, on his return from conducting Nina to the Towers, spent the evening in reading aloud an article on French literature.
But when his mother rose to go to bed, and he handed her the small heap of miscellanies without which she seldom moved, she looked almost coldly at the polished brown rosary that crowned the little pile.
“Thank you, my dear boy,” she said rather faintly, taking them from him, and added, as soon as Frances was out of earshot, “I assure you that that absurd woman has really almost put me off saying my rosary for the evening.”
XII
WHATEVER Lady Argent’s strictures on the length of time that Mrs. Severing might entertain a hypothetical director in the confessional, she did not herself hesitate to inflict upon the Prior at Twickenham an epistle which covered the better part of six pages.
Ludovic watched his mother’s pen hurrying over her paper with an uneasy sense of knowing what she was about, and presently asked her gently: