“Yes. He is a Jesuit priest.”
“You mean his mother, then, by ‘the Mother’?”
“Oh, she is not his mother. I don’t think they are related.”
“What is she?”
“The Abbess of a convent of English nuns at Bruges.”
“And is that poor little girl, Miss Annabella, one of the conspirators?”
“She is the decoy. I think her wits have been terrified out of her; she only does as she is told.”
“Hatty,” I said, “you do not believe the doctrines of Popery?”
“I don’t know what I believe, or don’t believe,” she sobbed. “If you can get me out of here and back home, I shall think there is a God again. I was beginning to doubt that and everything else.”
A voice came up the stairs, raised rather loudly.