"That will do, thank you, Miss Mildare. You are not alone here?"
Her glad smile assured him of that. "Oh no, I am with the Mother. I go everywhere with her, and I think I am of use. I am not at all afraid of sickness, you know, or—the other things."
"But yet," Saxham said, "you must be careful of your health."
"You have no idea how tremendously strong I am," she answered him, and he broke into laughter in spite of himself. She looked so tender, so delicately frail a creature to be there in that malodorous Gehenna, ministering to the wants of slatternly vrouws and stalwart, down-at-heel Irishwomen. His smile emboldened her to say: "I did not thank you the other day, after all."
"The Krupp shell came along and changed the subject of the conversation." He added: "Were you alarmed? You had rather an escape."
"I was with Mother."
"You love her very dearly?" The words had escaped him unconsciously. They were his spoken thought. She flushed, and said with a thrill of tenderness in her clear girlish tones:
"More dearly than it is possible to say. I don't believe God Himself will be angry with me that I have always seen His Face and Our Blessed Lady's shining through hers and beyond it; for He knows as no one else can ever know what she has been since they brought me to the Convent years and years ago."
"They" were her people, presumably. It was odd—Saxham supposed it the outcome of that Convent breeding—that she should speak of God as simply, to quote Gladstone's criticism on the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, as though He were her grandfather. Saxham had been reared in the Christian faith by a pious Welsh mother, but there had always been a little awkwardness about domestic references to the Deity. In times of sadness or bereavement He was frequently referred to. But always in a deprecatory tone.
"Your family is not Colonial?" he asked.