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"Well, anyhow, she hasn't the air of an engaged person. And if she's here when Arthur gets back to London, I feel in my bones, mother, there'll be ructions." "Arthur" was Doctor Smythe, a man not very young, whom Elinor Home-Davis had known for some time; but it was only lately that she had begun to hope he might ask her to marry him.
Home-Davis and Miss Elinor would never think of buying such things as Miss Grant admired. Jennings would have pioneered Miss Grant to the British and South Kensington museums if Miss Grant had wished to go, but Mary had no appetite for museums in the dark and forbidding November, which was the worst that London had known for years.
After sending off this message she felt relieved for a few days, as if she were secure from danger; but sometimes she waked in the night to worry lest Aunt Sara knew any one on the Riviera who might be instructed to look up a stray niece. Then she would comfort herself by reflecting that Mrs. Home-Davis was not at all the sort of woman to know people at Monte Carlo.
"She can't have met any men, unless at that old Scotchwoman's house," replied Mrs. Home-Davis. "Perhaps even their Romish consciences would have forced them to show her a few, before she took her vows Catholic young men, of course." "Perhaps one of them decided her to break the vows." "She hasn't really broken them, you know, Elinor. We must be just."
It was difficult for Mary to realize that this Aunt Sara could be a sister of the handsome, dark-faced man with burning eyes whose features had remained cameo-clear in her memory since childhood. But Mrs. Home-Davis was the ugly duckling of a handsome and brilliant family, an accident of fate which had embittered her youth, and indirectly her daughter's. "How shall I get away from them?"
Other women, older and not attractive, saw this favouritism, and swelled with resentment, as Elinor Home-Davis had when saying: "Is she the kind who can ever let men alone? She makes eyes at the footman!" Mary had never heard of "making eyes." One did not use these vulgar expressions at the convent.
Suddenly she recalled a solemn warning from Mrs. Home-Davis that some hotels refused to receive women travelling alone, and her heart was inclined to fail as she asked for a room. But fortunately this was not one of those cruel hotels Aunt Sara had heard about. Mary was received civilly and without surprise. A view of the sea? Certainly Mademoiselle could have a room with a view of the sea.
Home-Davis lived in Cromwell Road; and it was an extra incentive to Lady MacMillan that she would not be too far from the Oratory. It was evening when the two arrived at King's Cross Station, after the longest journey Mary had ever made. There was a black fog, cold and heavy as a dripping fur coat.
"It will be better for my Italian, to get one in Italy. I shall be safe alone till I arrive. You see, Reverend Mother has given me a letter to the Superior in the mother-house, and other letters, too. I shall have friends in Florence and Rome, and lots of places." "But it wouldn't look well for you to travel alone," Mrs. Home-Davis objected. "Nobody will be looking at me.
Mary asked herself, desperately, that night. But fate was fighting for her in the form of a man she had never seen, a man not even in London at the moment. In a room below Mary's Elinor was asking Mrs. Home-Davis how they could get rid of the convent cousin. "She won't do," the young woman said. "She reminds me of her mother," remarked Mrs. Home-Davis. "I thought she would grow up like that."
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