said she, with a glance around, "and I don't
wonder. This is the place where you broke a good man's heart. It will
remain bewitched until you accept some other man in the same spot. How
did we know, Miss Cleverly? Do you think Conny was as secret as you? And
didn't I witness the whole scene from the point yonder? I couldn't hear
the words, but there wasn't any need of it. Heavens, the expression of
you two!"

"Mona, do you mean to tell me that every one knew it?"

"Every soul, my dear ostrich with your head in the sand. The hope is
that you will not repeat the refusal when the next lover comes along.
And if you can arrange to have the scene come off here, as you arranged
for the last one ... I have always maintained that the lady with a
convent vocation is by nature the foxiest of all women. I don't know
why, but she shows it."

The usual fashion of teasing Honora attributed to her qualities opposed
to a religious vocation.

"Well, I have made up my mind to fly at once to the convent," she said,
"with my foxiness and other evil qualities. If it was my fault that one
man proposed to me----"

"It was your fault, of course. Why do you throw doubt upon it?"

"It will not be my fault that the second man proposes. So, this place
may remain accursed forever. Oh, my poor Lord Constantine! After all his
kindness to father and me, to be forced to inflict such suffering on
him! Why do men care for us poor creatures so much, Mona?"

"Because we care so much for them ..." Honora laughed ... "and because
we are necessary to their happiness. You should go round the stations on
your knees once a day for the rest of your life, for having rejected
Lord Conny. It wasn't mere ingratitude ... that was bad enough; but to
throw over a career so splendid, to desert Ireland so outrageously,"
this was mere pretence ... "to lose all importance in life for the sake
of a dream, for the sake of a convent."

"You have a prejudice against convents, Mona."

"No, dear, I believe in convents for those who are made that way. I
have noticed, perhaps you have too, that many people who should go to a
convent will not, and many people at present in the cloisters ought to
have stayed where nature put them first."

"It's pleasant on a day like this for you to feel that you are just
where nature intended you to be, isn't it? How did you leave the baby?"

Mona leaped into a rhapsody on the wonderful child, who was just then
filling the time of Anne,