“I shall miss her,” wistfully said Lady Argent, and added after a silence:
“My dearest boy, I do wish you would find some nice Catholic girl and marry her.”
Ludovic had heard this aspiration before, and felt no desire to comply with it.
“I’m quite happy as I am, mother darling,” he told her gently. “Besides, I don’t believe any nice Catholic girl would have me—a bald-headed heretic with a crutch. Now I must do a little writing, and you can say a rosary for my conversion. You know that’s what you always do say it for.”
“Yes, dear, it is, and one of these days when you least expect it, that prayer will be answered,” predicted his mother triumphantly.
“We shall see. You’d better be content with your latest conversion, for the time being. I’m sure it will knock at least five hundred years off your purgatory, as soon as it’s a fait accompli.”
But that the reception of Frances Grantham into the Catholic Church was not to become a fait accompli without some previous difficulty, soon became abundantly evident.
Frances did not prove to be a good correspondent, but Lady Argent received one or two letters from her, of which she imparted the contents to Ludovic, and then came a lengthy epistle from Bertha Tregaskis.
“Dearest Sybil, you have been such an angel to my little girl that I make no apology for thrusting her affairs—and my own—upon you. The fact is, the child is perfectly entichée with matters religious at the moment, and declares that only the Roman Catholic faith will do for her. You won’t misunderstand me if I confess that, if Frances were my own child, I should take away all her little holy books and ornaments in the midst of which she sits like a young virgin-martyr, and forbid her to speak of the subject again for at least a year. We should then see how much of it was an emotional craze, and how much genuine stuff. But the facts that she is not quite my own flesh and blood, and that her own mother did, in actual point of fact, belong to your Faith, make rather a difference. As Frederick says, we have no actual authority over the child, and one hesitates as to how far coercion may be desirable in such a case. Frederick, man-like, refuses to discuss the subject with anybody—what cowards men are! ‘’Usbands be proper fules for the most part, and us dü arl the yead work for both,’ as one of my old women said to me the other day!
“Well, my dear, the upshot of it all is, am I to let the child go to this convent at Easter, where she wants to make a Ladies’ Retreat—whatever that may be—and, I suppose, eventually be received into the Catholic Church? Can you tell me anything about this convent, what sort of a woman the Reverend Mother is, and what sort of people she will come across there? I shall send poor Minnie Blandflower with her, if I let her go at all.