‘Why don’t you go and live there? You could.’
‘Ah, that is another thing. Wellfield is a lovely spot, and the Abbey is a place to be proud of, no doubt; but to live there, after the kind of life one has been accustomed to here—c’est autre chose! It’s a Roman Catholic neighbourhood. Brentwood is close to, you know—the great Jesuit seminary, and a lot of those fossilised Roman Catholic gentry, as proud as Lucifer, and as exclusive as—as only such people can be.’
‘But surely we are their equals.’
‘Oh dear, yes! We have always been on the best of terms with them all, chiefly perhaps because we have been so little at Wellfield that there has been no time or chance for differences to arise. I don’t know how I should like it to live in, unless——’
‘Unless what?’
‘If something I should like very much took place, I should certainly ask my father to let me take up my abode at the Abbey. Who knows, Avice, under what circumstances you may go first to Wellfield Abbey?’
They found themselves opposite the Vier Jahreszeiten. Jerome looked at his watch.
‘I tell you what, young lady, we have consumed no end of time in this discussion. My father will think himself ill-used. We promised to walk with him at twelve. Come and let us find him.’
They went into the hall, and an attendant hurried up to them, only to say that Mr. Wellfield the elder had been taken very ill while reading his newspapers before rising, that a doctor had been sent for, and that he lay now between life and death.
Jerome and his sister hastened upstairs, and found their father in alternate convulsions of pain and intervals of utter, swooning unconsciousness. The doctor came, and after a very short examination pronounced the attack to be a most serious one. A Sister of Mercy from a neighbouring institution was sent for. Hours of suspense and anxiety passed before the delirious anguish of the patient at all abated. The dusk of evening had fallen, when the doctor, coming into the salon, found Jerome and Avice seated together in the window; the girl’s head pillowed on her brother’s knee, her hand in his.