Part 41 (2/2)

She started and coloured, having retained all the childish, uneasy belief that her father lived in an atmosphere far above that into which the sound and sight of his children's daily doings could penetrate to his knowledge without the special intervention of some accredited emissary such as their mother.

As he spoke Lady Isabel looked up, and Barbara left the piano and came slowly down the room.

”_It has come_” flashed through Alex' mind. She only said very lamely:

”I--I don't know what you mean, father.” There was all the s.h.i.+fting uneasiness in her manner that Sir Francis most disliked.

”Oh, darling, don't prevaricate,” hastily broke in Lady Isabel, with an obvious uneasiness that gave the impression of being rooted in something deeper and of longer standing than the atmosphere of disturbance momentarily created.

”But you did not want me to come with you and Barbara to the Stores this afternoon,” said Alex cravenly. The instinct of evading the direct issue was so strongly implanted in her, that she was prepared to have recourse to the feeblest and least convincing of subterfuges in order to gain time.

”Of course, I don't want you to come _anywhere_ when it all so obviously bores you,” plaintively said Lady Isabel. ”I have almost given up trying to take you anywhere, Alex, as you very well know. You evidently prefer to go and sit in a little stuffy back-room somewhere with Heaven knows whom, sooner than remain in the company of your mother and sister.”

Alex felt too much dismayed and unwillingly convicted to make any reply, but after a momentary silence Sir Francis spoke ominously.

”Indeed! is that so?”

The suspicion that had laid dormant in Alex for a long time woke to life. Her father's disappointment in her, none the less keenly felt because inarticulate, had become merged into a far greater bitterness: that of his resentment on behalf of his wife. A personal grievance he might overlook, though once perceived he would never forget it, but where Lady Isabel's due was concerned, her husband was capable of implacability.

”And may one inquire whose is the society which you find so preferable to that of your family?” he asked her, with the manifest sarcasm that in him denoted the extreme of anger.

Alex was const.i.tutionally so much terrified of disapproval that it produced in her a veritable physical inability to explain herself. She cast an agonized look around her. Her mother was leaning back, her face strained and tired, and would not meet her eye. Sir Francis, she knew without daring to look at him, was swinging his eye-gla.s.ses to and fro, with a measured regularity that indicated his determination to wait inexorably and for any length of time for a reply to his inquiry.

Barbara's big, alert eyes moved from one member of the group to another, acute and full of apprais.e.m.e.nt of them all.

Alex flung a wordless appeal to her sister. Barbara did not fail to receive and understand it, and after a moment she spoke:

”Alex goes to see the Superior of that convent near Bryanston Square.

She made friends with her in the summer, didn't you, Alex?”

”Yes,” faltered Alex. Some instinct of trying to palliate what she felt would be looked upon as undesirable made her add in feeble extenuation, ”It is a house of the same Order as the Liege one where I was at school, you know.”

”Your devotion to it was not so marked in those days, if I remember right,” said her father in the same, rather elaborately sarcastic strain.

Lady Isabel, no less uneasy under it than was Alex herself, broke in with nervous exasperation in her every intonation:

”Oh, Francis, it is the same old story--one of those foolish infatuations. You know what she has always been like, and how worried I was about that dreadful Torrance girl. It's this nun now, I suppose.”

”Who is this woman?”

”How should I know?” helplessly said Lady Isabel. ”Alex?”

”The Superior--the Head of the house.” Alex stopped. How could one say, ”Mother Gertrude of the Holy Cross?” She did not even know what the Superior's name in the world had been, or where she came from.

”Go on,” said Sir Francis inexorably.

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