By this time the tears were streaming down Zella's face. Aunt Marianne said "My poor child" two or three times, kissed her very kindly, and sent her upstairs to He down and rest for a little before the others came in.
That evening, in her room, Zella, in floods of tears, withdrew her own copy of her mother's photograph from the flat leather travelling frame in which she had kept it ever since she could remember, and placed it in the middle of the mantelpiece, from whence she had carefully removed the clock and a few small china ornaments.
Then she took the little vase of flowers with which her dressing-table was kept supplied, and placed it in front of the photograph. There was a certain mournful pleasure in the aspect of the shrine when completed, and Zella's tears only broke out again next day upon discovering that an officious housemaid had replaced the clock and china ornaments upon her mantelpiece, and restored the vase of flowers to its original position on the dressing-table.
V
I HATE Sundays," growled James.
Muriel looked sincerely shocked, but was too much in awe of her brother to make any remonstrance.
Zella, conscious that the stronger part of her audience was with her, remarked airily: "Sunday is the most amusing day of the week in Paris."
She felt superior and cosmopolitan as she spoke.
"You won't find it that here," said James grimly, as they entered the dining-room for breakfast.
On the two preceding Sundays, Zella had not been taken to church with her cousins, because it was feared that it might "upset" her, and the day had been unmarked save by the absence of the Lloyd-Evans family during a couple of hours, which had enabled her to read a story-book alone in the schoolroom. Consequently Zella, who scarcely ever went to church at Villetswood, felt no desire whatever to fulfil her duties as a member of the Church of England.
But with characteristic adaptability she assented in grateful tones when Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, kissing her, said:
"Good-morning, Zella dear. This will be a nice fine Sunday for you to come to church, won't it?"
This subtle implication that the weather alone had been responsible for Zella's absence from church hitherto gave a lighter aspect to the case, and almost seemed, in some oblique manner, to glide over and ignore the existence of any possible cause for being "upset."
"Yes, Aunt Marianne," Zella answered readily.
"I hope that Crawford won't be so long-winded to-day," said Mr. Lloyd-Evans. "He was nearly twenty minutes in the pulpit last Sunday, saying the same thing over and over again, as far as I could make out."
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, by glancing swiftly from her husband's face to James on one side of the table, and Muriel on the other, conveyed to Henry that he was not being quite careful in what he said before the children.
"Of course," he added hurriedly, "a sermon's a very good thing, and it's extraordinary where the poor chap does get all his ideas, considering all the sermons he must have to write in a year."
James looked contemptuous.
"Don't make faces, Jimmy," said his mother, shaking her head at him. Mrs. Lloyd-Evans was the only person who ever called James Jimmy, and Zella felt certain that he resented the diminutive.
He now coloured angrily all over his dark face, and Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, carefully looking away from him, gently changed the conversation by asking for the marmalade.
"I like sermons," volunteered Muriel, who also wanted to distract attention from her brother's obvious ill-temper.
"1£ they are good," Zella conceded, with the air of a critic.
She had only once or twice heard an English sermon at Villetswood, but her father had once taken her to hear a famous Dominioan preacher in Paris.
"The best sermon I ever heard," she added in a very grown-up voice, "was in Paris. Père La Vedée, you know."
"But he is a monk, isn't he ?" said Muriel, round-eyed.
"That is one of the R.C. fellows, surely?" said Mr. Lloyd-Evans. Zella felt rather pleased at the small sensation she was creating, and replied airily:
"Oh yes. When we did go to church in Paris, it was always to a Catholic one. My aunt and grandmother are very devotes; in fact, Tante Stéphanie goes to church every single day."
"I thought French people had no religion," exclaimed Muriel innocently.
"Idiot," muttered James under his breath.
"French people have their religion just as we have ours, darling," Mrs. Lloyd-Evans said. "There are, unfortunately, a great number of Roman Catholics on the Continent, and one must be broad-minded and believe that they are sincere in worshipping their Pope, as they practically do. No doubt a great many of them really do not know any better."
"But they don't, Aunt Marianne," cried Zella—" I mean, worship the Pope. Catholics are really much more pious than Protestants—at least, all the French ones that I've known."
"Roman Catholics, Zella," said her aunt in the low voice of extreme forbearance. "It is because of the Pope of Rome that we, in the Catholic Church, are obliged to call them Roman Catholics. But that is quite enough. French people are known to be most irreligious, though I have no doubt you may find a well-meaning one here and there. But the Continental Sunday is well known, all over England, to be a disgrace."
"But Aunt Marianne, in Paris"
"That will do, dear. You are not likely to be allowed to go to Paris again, still less into a Roman Catholic place of worship."
The tone, and still more its dreadful suggestion of a new regime, never to be relaxed again, brought Zella's ever ready tears to the surface, and she gulped them down in silence with her coffee.
Her only consolation was a sub-audible aside from James, who sat next her.
"If French people worship the Pope, English people worship the Church of England," he muttered cryptically.
But James was not destined to be epigrammatic unobserved, and his mother's low tones, with their peculiar quality of gentle relentlessness, were once more addressed to him:
"Jimmy, do not show off and try and say smart things. It sounds irreverent, dear, though I dare say you spoke without quite knowing the meaning of your own words. Now, if you have all finished, you can go, and mind you are ready at twenty minutes to eleven punctually."
She rose as she spoke, and as her son, looking sulky and lowering, held open the door, she paused, and, laying her hand upon his shoulder, said, in tones just audible to Zella:
"Your last Sunday at home, Jimmy!"
The boy looked sulkier than before, and Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, with one long reproachful look, left the room.
James muttered, "Thank goodness it is my last Sunday at home !" as he crossed the hall with Zella and Muriel.
"Oh, James !" cried his sister piteously.
"I didn't mean that exactly—only I'm sick of being called Jimmy, and having my better feeling appealed to, and all the rest of it."
"I don't know why you should mind being called Jimmy," said Muriel resentfully, seizing on the only part of his speech which she had understood. "Not that anyone but mother ever does."
"I should hope not. You know better than to try it on, I should think!"
"Well, after all, I always used to. It's only lately you've made all this fuss," said Muriel, suddenly plaintive. "Jimmy is the dear old nursery name that we always"
"Good heavens!" cried her brother.