“I am old-fashioned,” said Miss Mason. “But after all it is the same God we worship.”
“And if,” said Barnabas, “she is Philippe’s child, as I believe, he would be glad. He was a devout Catholic with a strange mixture of Paganism. I believe that for him the altars of Pan and Christ were built side by side.”
Miss Mason looked at Barnabas with a little twinkle in her eyes.
“You’ll have to take her to church,” she said.
Barnabas laughed. “You think that after all there may be some advantage in her baptism?”
Again there was a silence. Then Barnabas spoke.
“If Philippe were her father, and I can’t help feeling sure of it, he must have died some months before her birth. Possibly before he knew that she was even thought of.”
And then Miss Mason put a question, one which had been in the minds of both of them throughout that conversation at least, but, being a woman, it was she who voiced it.
“I wonder,” she said quietly, “who was her mother?”
“Exactly,” said Barnabas.