'Quite.'
'It will be nice to make him happy,' she said, softly. 'His letters have been pretty doleful.'
'What has he found to write about?' exclaimed Lord Findon, wondering.
'Himself, mostly!' she laughed. 'He likes rhetoric—and he seems to have found out that I do too. As I told you, he began with an apology—and since then he writes about books and art—and—and the evils of aristocracy.'
'Bless my soul, what the deuce does he know about it! And you answer him?'
'Yes. You see he writes extremely well—and it amuses me.'
Privately, he thought that if she encouraged him beyond a very moderate point, Fenwick would soon become troublesome. But whenever she pleaded that anything 'amused' her, he could never find a word to say.
Every now and then he watched her, furtively trying to pierce that grey veil in which she had wrapt herself. To-morrow morning, he supposed, he should hear her step on the stairs, towards eight o'clock—should hear it passing his door in going, and an hour later in coming back—and should know that she had been to a little Ritualist church close by, where what Lady Findon called 'fooleries' went on, in the shape of 'daily celebrations' and 'vestments' and 'reservation.' How lightly she stepped; what a hidden act it was; never spoken of, except once, between him and her! It puzzled him often; for he knew very well that Eugénie was no follower of things received. She had been a friend of Renan and of Taine in her French days; and he, who was a Gallic with a leaning to the Anglican Church, had sometimes guessed with discomfort that Eugénie was in truth what his Low Church wife called a 'free-thinker.' She never spoke of her opinions, directly, even to him. But the books she ordered from Paris, or Germany, and every now and then the things she let fall about them, were enough for any shrewd observer. It was here too, perhaps, that she and Arthur were in closest sympathy; and every one knew that Arthur, poor old boy, was an agnostic.
And yet this daily pilgrimage—and that light and sweetness it breathed into her aspect!—
So one day he had asked her abruptly why she liked the little church so much, and its sacramental 'goings-on.'