But Rosamund took comfort with her when she went back to Frances.
“If it’s only Cousin Bertie,” said Frances rather surprisingly, “I don’t mind so much. I know I’m frightened of her, though she’s so very, very kind, but Father Anselm says that my first duty is to God, and that it’s not as if she were really my mother. He thinks I ought to enter now.”
“It’s only an experiment,” cried Rosamund entreatingly, but with a sinking heart.
And Frances would not contradict her.
The days dragged by in an atmosphere of eternal discomfort.
Bertha’s face showed signs of wearing and of wakeful nights, but she remained determinedly normal and even cheerful. Miss Blandflower loyally supported her with chirping and obvious contributions to the lagging conversation at meals and in the evenings, and even Frances, pale-faced and with scared, sorrowful eyes, made her evident and rather piteous attempts to behave as usual in the face of a mental struggle that she felt to be only the strength-sapping preliminary to an impending crisis of upheaval.
Rosamund, supersensitive to atmosphere, and bearing the weight of her sister’s dumb unhappiness as well as that of her own rebellious, apprehensive misery, began to feel that the only hope of relief for any of them lay in the decisive cutting of the Gordian knot.
“This can’t go on, you know,” she said ruthlessly to Frances. “What are you waiting for?”
“Waiting for?”
“Yes. Do you think Cousin Bertie will ever give in?”