“You had better come when Bee and Conny meet me.  Let me see—­will the retreat be over by that time?  Are you going to it?  You are an associate of St. Faith.”

“Yes, but I don’t see how I could go to the retreat.  Oh, what a relief it would be to have such a week!”

“Exactly what I feel,” said Lady Susan, somewhat to her surprise.  “It strengthens and sets me right for the year.  Dr. Easterby conducts this one.  Do you not know him?  Is not Rood House near Backsworth?”

“Yes on the other side, but he is utterly out of my reach.  Julius Charnock looks up to him so much; but his name—­even more than St. Faith’s—­would horrify my father.”

“You could not go direct there,” said Lady Susan; “but when once you are with me you are my charge, and I could take you.”

She considered a little.  Both she and her friend knew that all her religious habits were alien to Sir Harry, and that what he had freely permitted, sometimes shared at Rockpier, was now only winked at, and that if he had guessed the full extent of her observances he would have stormily issued a prohibition.  Could it be wrong to spend part of her visit to Lady Susan with her hostess in a sisterhood, when she had no doubt as to attending services which he absolutely never dreamt of, and therefore did not forbid?  The sacred atmosphere and holy meditations, without external strife and constant watchfulness, seemed to the poor girl like water to the thirsty; and she thought, after all the harass and whirl of the bazaar and race week, she might thus recruit her much-needed strength for the decisive conflicts her majority would bring.

Lady Susan had no doubts.  The ‘grand old wreck’ was in his present aspect a hoary old persecutor, and charming Lady Tyrrell a worldly, scheming elder sister.  It was as much an act of charity to give their victim an opportunity of devotion and support as if she had been the child of abandoned parents in a back court in East London.  Reserve to prevent a prohibition was not in such cases treachery or disobedience; and she felt herself doing a mother’s part, as she told her daughters, with some enjoyment of the mystery.  Eleonora made no promise, hoping to clear her mind by consideration, or to get Julius’s opinion.  He and his wife dined at Sirenwood, and found Joe Reynolds’s drawings laid out for inspection, while Lady Susan was advising that, instead of selling them, there should be an industrial exhibition of all curiosities of art and nature to be collected in the neighbourhood, and promising her own set of foreign photographs and coloured costumes, which had served such purposes many and many a time.