“Dick seems to forget that he is Larry’s guardian as well as I. Also that Larry is a Roman Catholic, and it is not only useless but dishonourable to ignore it!”

It has been said that Lady Isabel had les qualities de ses defauts; in Miss Coppinger’s case the words may be restored to their rightful sequence.  She had the inevitable defauts de ses qualites.  The sense of duty was as prominent a feature of her soul as a hump on her long straight back would have been, but toleration was inconspicuous.  She ran straight herself, and though she could forgive deviations on the part of others, she could not forget them.  She was entirely and implacably Protestant, a typical member of that Church that expects friendship from its votaries, but leaves their course of action to their own consciences.  It was a very successful example of the malign humour of Fate that Miss Coppinger’s ward should belong to the other Church, that exacts not only obedience, but passion, and it was a master-stroke that Frederica’s sense of duty should compel her to enforce her nephew to compliance with its demands.

“Dear Frederica, Dick will leave all religious things to you, I know—­” warbled Lady Isabel, in her gentle, musical voice, that suggested something between the tones of a wood pigeon and an ocarina.  “And they couldn’t be in better hands!”

“But my dear Isabel, that is precisely what I complain of!  Dick’s solitary suggestion has been that we should send Larry to Winchester, which is perfectly impracticable!  I entirely agree with him, but, unfortunately, I know that it is our duty to send him to one of those—­” Miss Coppinger hesitated, swallowed several adjectives, and ended with Christian tameness—­“one of those special schools for Roman Catholics.”

“Well, dear, I daresay it won’t make very much difference,” consoled Lady Isabel.  “I have always heard that Monkshurst was a charming school, and dear Larry will be so well off—­I don’t suppose his religion will interfere in any way.  It seldom does, does it?”

“Not, I admit, unless he wanted a job in this country!” began Miss Coppinger grimly, and again remembered that intolerance was not to be encouraged.  “The end of it is that I shall endeavour to do my duty—­which is, apparently, to do everything that I most entirely disapprove of—­and that on the day Larry is twenty-one, I shall march out of Coppinger’s Court, and dance a jig, and then he may have the Pope to stay with him if he likes!”

While Miss Coppinger was thus belabouring and releasing her conscience in the drawing-room, quite another matter was engaging the attention of her ward, and of his entertainers at the school-room tea-table.  This was no less a thing than the dissolving of the existing Bands, and the formation of a new society, to be known as “The Companions of Finn.”

Larry Coppinger’s entrance, literally at a bound, into the Talbot-Lowry family group, had landed him, singularly enough, into the heart of their affection and esteem.  He was now the originator of this revolutionary scheme, and having in him that special magnetic force that confers leadership, the scheme was being put through.