"You perplex me, Arnold," she said thoughtfully. "I do not understand your position in the matter. I always looked upon you as a somewhat indolent person. Yet I find you now taking any amount of trouble in a matter which really does not concern you at all. Whence all this good-nature?"
"Lady Delahaye——"
"Eileen," she interrupted softly.
"Lady Delahaye," I answered firmly. "You must forgive me if I remind you that I have no longer the right to call you by any other name. I am not good-natured, and I am afraid that I am still indolent. Nevertheless, I am interested in this child, and I intend to do my utmost to prevent her returning to this place."
"I am still in the dark," she said, looking at me curiously. "She is nothing to you. A more unsuitable home for her than with three young men I cannot imagine. You seem to want to keep her there. Why? She is a child to-day, it is true—but in little more than a year's time she will be a woman. The position then for you will be full of embarrassments."
"I find the position now," I answered, "equally embarrassing. We can only give the child up to you, send her back to the convent, or keep her ourselves. Of the three we prefer to keep her."
"You seem to have a great distaste for the convent," she remarked, "but that is because you are not a Catholic, and you do not understand these things. She would at least be safe there, and in time, I think, happy."
We were at the head of the village street now, upon a slight eminence. I pointed backwards to the prison-like building, standing grim and desolate on the bare hillside.
"I should consider myself no less a murderer than the man who shot your husband," I answered, "if I sent her there. I have made all the enquiries I could in the neighbourhood, and I have added to them my own impressions. The secular part of the place may be conducted as other places of its sort, but the great object of Madame Richard's sister is to pass her pupils from that into the religious portion. Isobel is not adapted for such a life."
Lady Delahaye shrugged her shoulders.