“This is a proper ole yarn, isn’t it, but I rely on you to understand that I only want what is best for Francie, and am writing to you, since I know you’re fond of the child, and can probably advise me as to the convent and other particulars.”
“Dear Bertie is most kind-hearted and charitable, isn’t she?” said Lady Argent, “and of course I can write and tell her anything she wants to know about the convent. How very glad I am that dear little Frances is going there! but I wish Bertie would send her sister with her, as well as Miss Blandflower.”
“I don’t think Miss Rosamund is at all inclined to be interested in religion for its own sake, somehow,” returned Ludovic, rightly divining that his mother viewed Miss Blandflower and Rosamund alike in the light of possible fish for the convent net.
Lady Argent murmured that the grace of God was very wonderful, and you couldn’t tell at all, and then returned to her correspondence.
“Father Anselm writes that he is very much pleased with her dispositions,” she presently observed, looking up from a letter.
“H’m!” said Ludovic, feeling oddly out of charity with the members of religious orders generally, and the Prior of Twickenham in particular.
He speculated often during the next few months as to events at Porthlew, and their effect upon Rosamund and Frances Grantham, but he was much in London and heard little news of them.
It was just before Easter-time that his mother triumphantly told him that the date for Frances’ visit to the convent was arranged for the following week.
“And I can’t tell you, my dear boy, what a relief it is to me after all the correspondence there has been with dear Bertie, and Father Anselm, and the poor child herself, who never wavered at all, but one couldn’t help feeling that at any moment she might begin to wonder whether it wasn’t her duty to do as Bertie advised, and wait. So fatal in a question of religion, I always think. And it would have been dreadful to see dear little Frances one of those shilly-shallying souls, never either quite in or quite out of the Church,” said Lady Argent, in a voice which had become, to Ludovic’s perceptions, charged with reminiscences of Nina Severing.