"Ah, well, ah, well, for I my part I admire zeal, I must confess, Mrs. Lovegrove," he said. "No doubt these terrible lapses will occur. Superstition and bigotry will claim their victims even in our enlightened century, and this free England of ours. I would not judge the case of this poor fellow, Iglesias, too harshly. Race influences are strong; and we of the Anglo-Saxon stock, with our enormous advantages of brain, and grit, and hard-headed manliness of character, can afford—deeply though we deplore their weakness and errors—to be lenient toward the less favoured foreigner. Our mission is to educate him.—And this I think you should not have forgotten, Lovegrove. You should have acted upon it. You should have brought your unfortunate friend to me. I should have been quite willing to give him half an hour, or even longer. A few facts, a little plain speaking, might have saved him from more than I quite care to contemplate, both here and hereafter.—However, good-bye to you, Mrs. Lovegrove. You are starting, too, Miss Serena? Assure your good, kind sister, when you write, how gladly Mrs. Nevington and I shall avail ourselves of her proffered hospitality."
"Don't fret, don't take it too much to heart, Georgie dear," the wife said soothingly later. "The vicar did seem very stern, but that was owing to Serena. I am afraid she's a terrible mischief-maker, is Serena. She turns things inside out so in saying them, that you do not recognise your own words again. All this afternoon she was most trying. If Dr. Nevington heard the real story, he would never blame you. You must not fret."
"I am not fretting about Dr. Nevington," he answered, "but about Dominic. I am afraid we shall not have him with us very much longer, Rhoda."
"Oh! dear, oh! dear, you don't mean it? Never!" she cried in accents of genuine distress. "Did you see him, Georgie?"
"No, Miss St. John was there."
The wife's large cheeks shook again.
"You know," she said, "I am never very partial to hearing anything about that Miss St. John. Actresses are all very well in the theatre, I daresay, but they are out of place in private houses. And from what I hear, though there may be nothing really wrong with many of them, they are all sadly free in their manners. I should be very hurt if you got into the habit of frequenting their society much, Georgie.—But there, I'm sure I cannot tell what is coming to all the women nowadays! You don't seem as if you could be safe with any one of them. To think of a middle-aged person like Mrs. Porcher, for instance, taking up with that little snip of a Farge, and she old enough to be his mother!"
The wife bustled about the room straightening the chairs, patting cushions into place, folding up the handkerchief which, in the interests of human conversation, had been thrown over the cage of the all-too-articulate parrot.
"I feel terribly stirred up somehow," she said, "what with the vicar, and Serena, and all the talk about Roman Catholics and Protestants, and Mrs. Porcher's engagement, too, and then this bad news of Mr. Iglesias—not but that I am sure enough we shall meet him in heaven some day, if we can ever contrive to get there ourselves in all this chatter and worry—"
She laid the handkerchief away in the drawer of the work-table.