“If it’s any comfort to her sister, mother, I should let her think it. Anyhow, it gives her time to become more reconciled to the idea, before the whole thing is made irrevocable.”
Lady Argent shook her head, and said that dear Ludovic knew nothing about it, and what was the use of living in a fool’s paradise, though of course one couldn’t exactly say that poor Rosamund was in any sort of paradise just now, but she ended by following her son’s advice and allowing Rosamund to dwell on the thought that sooner or later Frances would relinquish her convent life.
Ludovic, however, observant and speculative, came to the conclusion, during the few days she spent with them in London, that there was no conviction in Rosamund’s assertion that sooner or later her sister would return to her.
He would have liked to talk to Rosamund, the instinct of compassion within him reminding him strangely of their first meeting in the Wye Valley days.
But she hardly appeared to be conscious of his existence, and Ludovic was too intuitive not to be aware that her every faculty was still absorbed in Frances, and Frances only.
On the evening before she left London, however, Ludovic obtained a few words with Rosamund.
He found her in the hall, looking wistfully at the letters which had just come in by the last post.
She looked up with a faint smile at the sound of his crutch upon the tiles.
“It’s very foolish, but I keep thinking that I shall have a letter from Frances,” she said. “And all the time I know quite well she isn’t allowed to write more than once a week—and even that is only supposed to be a very special concession.”
“In Heaven’s name, why? What is the object of it all?”