“Very different indeed,” dryly remarked Ludovic. “But please go on about Twickenham. Did you spend the whole day there?”
“Yes,” said the unconscious Frances. “They gave us lunch and tea in the guest-house, and showed us all over the grounds, and we stayed to Benediction in the evening. It was so nice.”
“Such good music, my dear boy,” said Lady Argent in a pleading tone of extenuation.
Ludovic refused to attribute the visit to any music, good or otherwise, but he said no more until he found himself alone with his mother, who faced him with a mixture of deprecation and resoluteness in her gaze.
“I know you don’t approve, darling,” she said bravely, “but the fact was that that poor little dear really requires some spiritual direction, and I had already written to Father Anselm about her, and he was so very anxious that I should put her into the way of being taught something about the Faith, that it really seemed one’s duty. You see she will be dreadfully cut off from everything when she gets back to Porthlew.”
“And what is the Prior going to do? Lend her books?” said Ludovic, with a most unenthusiastic intonation, and a vivid recollection of the innumerable devotional manuals of suggestive titles that were strewn about his mother’s bedroom and boudoir.
“Yes, dear,” meekly returned Lady Argent; “and—I am really afraid you won’t approve at all, Ludovic—but she is most anxious to be instructed—and really when one remembers that her mother was a Catholic and everything——” She paused helplessly.
“You can’t have had her turned into a Catholic already?”
“No—they wouldn’t receive her until she knew more about it—but Father Anselm is going to give her a course of instruction by post.”
“Mother, you really are not acting fairly by Mrs. Tregaskis.”