She said it so quaintly that Lynette laughed, though there was a pained contraction between the delicate eyebrows and a vexed and sorrowful shadow on her face. Greta went on:
"We have all of us always known that you were—a mystery. Has it got anything to do with the Duchess?"
The round, shallow blue eyes were too greedily curious to be pretty at the moment. Lynette met them with a full, grave, answering denial.
"No; I am nothing to the Duchess of Broads, or she to me. She is sister to the Mother-Superior, and she sends to me at Christmas and Easter, and on birthdays, by the Mother's wish. Doesn't the Mother's second sister, the Princesse de Dignmont-Veziers, send Katie"—Katie was a little Irish novice—"presents from Paris twice a year?"
Greta's pretty eyebrows went up. Her blue greedy eyes became circular with surprise.
"Yes, of course—out of charity, because Katie was a foundling, picked up in the Irish quarter in Cape Town."
Lynette went on steadily, but, looking out of the window at the great wistaria that climbed upon the angle of the Convent wing in which were the nuns' cells.
"If Katie was a foundling, I am nothing better."
"Lynette Mildare, you're never in earnest?"
The shocked tone and the scandalised disgust on Greta's pretty face stung and hurt. But Lynette went on: