would be advisable to disturb salutary and seasonable
meditations with--arah!--worldly matters at this present moment."

"Fiddle-faddle!" said the Dowager-Duchess sharply.

Lord Castleclare lifted his melancholy arched eyebrows.

"'Fiddle-faddle,' my dear Constantia?"

"You have the expression!" said she. "Young women of Bridget-Mary's age
and temperament will think of marriage in convents as much as outside
them. Further, I dread delay, entertaining as I do the very certain
conviction that this weak-minded man who has thrown your daughter over
will be back, begging Bridget-Mary to forgive him and reinstate him in the
possession of her affections before another two months are over our heads.
That little cat-eyed, squirrel-haired woman he has run away with, and
against whom I have warned our poor dear girl times out of number"--she
really believed this--"is the sort of pussy, purring creature to make a
man feel her claws, once she has got him. Therefore, although my family
may not thank me for it, I shall continue to repeat, 'No time is to be
lost!' Still, in deference to your religious prejudices, and although I
never heard that the Catholic Church prohibited jam as an article of
Lenten diet, we will defer from offering Bridget-Mary the pot until
Easter."

But Easter brought the news that Lady Bridget-Mary had decided upon taking
the veil, and begged her father not to oppose her wishes. The
Dowager-Duchess rushed to the Kensington Convent.... All the little
straw-mats on the slippery floor of the parlour were swept like chaff
before the hurricane of her advancing petticoats as she bore down upon the
most disappointing, erratic, and self-willed niece that ever brought the
grey hairs of a solicitous and devoted aunt in sorrow to the grave,
demanding in Heaven's name what Bridget-Mary meant by this maniacal
decision? Then she drew back, for at first she hardly credited that this
tall, pale, quiet woman in the plain, close-fitting, black woollen gown
could be Bridget-Mary at all. Realising that it could be nobody else, she
began to cry quite hysterically, subsiding upon a Berlin woolwork covered
sofa, while her niece rang the bell for that customary Convent
restorative, a teaspoonful of essence of orange-flower in a glass of
water, and returning to the side of her agitated relative, took her hand,
encased in a tight one-button puce glove, saying:

"Dear Aunt Constantia, what is the use of crying? I have done wit