"I can't see that my mother did any harm. Why, she even suspected her own twin-brother! If you were to bear ill-will against my mother——"
"Of such little tricks I am incapable, Sir Thomas. And of course I can allow for foreigners. Even twenty years of English life cannot bring them to see things as we do. Their nature is so—well, I won't say narrow. Neither will I say 'bigoted,' although——"
"We quite understand you, my dear madam." Mr. Penniloe was shocked at his own rudeness, in thus interrupting a lady, but he knew that very little more would produce a bad breach betwixt Walderscourt and Foxden. "What a difference really does exist among people equally just and upright——"
"My dear mother is as just and upright as any Englishwoman in the world, Protestant or Catholic," the young man exclaimed, having temper on the bubble, yet not allowing it to boil against a lady. "But if his own mother condemned him, how—I can't put it into words, as I mean it—how can she be in a wax with my mother? And more than that—as it happens, Mrs. Fox, my mother starts for Spain to day, and I cannot let her go alone."
"Now the Lord must have ordered it so," thought the Parson. "What a clearance of hostile elements!" But fearing that the others might not so take it, he said only—"Ah, indeed!"
"To her native land?" asked Mrs. Fox, as a Protestant not quite unbigoted; and a woman who longed to have it out. "It seems an extraordinary thing just now. But perhaps it is a pilgrimage."
"Yes, madam, for about £500,000," answered Sir Thomas, in his youthful Tory vein, not emancipated yet from disdain of commerce; "not for the sake of the money, of course; but to do justice to the brother she had wronged. Mr. Penniloe can tell you all about it. I am not much of a hand at arithmetic."
"We won't trouble any one about that now;" the lady replied with some loftiness. "But I presume that Lady Waldron would wish to see me, before she leaves this country."
"Certainly she would if she had known that you were here. My sister had not come back yet, to tell her. She will be disappointed terribly, when she hears that you have been at Perlycross. But she is compelled to catch the Packet; and I fear that I must say 'good-bye'; mother would never forgive me, if she lost her voyage through any fault of mine."