“You are a Catholic, Monsieur?” she asked him, fervently.  “How I envy you!  I adore the Oratory!  When we are in town I always go there to Benediction—­unless Mamma wants me at home to pour out tea.  Do you know Cardinal C——?”

She named a Cardinal Archbishop, then presiding over the diocese of Westminster.

“Yes, mademoiselle, I know him quite well.  I have just been staying with him.”

She clasped her hands eagerly.

“How very interesting!  I know him a little. Isn’t he nice?”

“No,” said Mariette resolutely.  “He is magnificent—­a saint—­a scholar—­everything—­but not nice!”

The girl looked a little puzzled, then angry, and after a few minutes’ more conversation she returned to her young men, conspicuously turning her back on Mariette.

He threw a deprecating, half-penitent look at Elizabeth, whose faced twitched with amusement, and sat down in a corner behind her that he might observe without talking.  His quick intelligence sorted the people about him almost at once—­the two yeoman-squires, who were not quite at home in Mrs. Gaddesden’s drawing-room, were awkward with their tea-cups, and talked to each other in subdued voices, till Elizabeth found them out, summoned them to her side, and made them happy; the agent who was helping Lady Merton with tea, making himself generally useful; Philip and another gilded youth, the son, he understood, of a neighbouring peer, who were flirting with the girl in white; and yet a third fastidious Etonian, who was clearly bored by the ladies, and was amusing himself with the adjutant and a cigarette in a distant corner.  His eyes came back at last to the pasteur.  An able face after all; cool, shrewd, and not unspiritual.  Very soon, he, the parson—­whose name was Everett—­and Elizabeth were drawn into conversation, and Marietta under Everett’s good-humoured glance found himself observed as well as observer.

“You are trying to decipher us?” said Everett, at last, with a smile.  “Well, we are not easy.”

“Could you be a great nation if you were?”

“Perhaps not.  England just now is a palimpsest—­the new writing everywhere on top of the old.  Yet it is the same parchment, and the old is there.  Now you are writing on a fresh skin.”

“But with the old ideas!” said Mariette, a flash in his dark eyes.  “Church—­State—­family!—­there is nothing else to write with.”

The two men drew closer together, and plunged into conversation.  Elizabeth was left solitary a moment, behind the tea-things.  The buzz of the room, the hearty laugh of the Lord Lieutenant, reached the outer ear.  But every deeper sense was strained to catch a voice—­a step—­that must soon be here.  And presently across the room, her eyes met her mother’s, and their two expectancies touched.

“Mother!—­here is Mr. Anderson!”

Philip entered joyously, escorting his guest.