"Aunt Amelia," said I, "in that sense means your Boulogne school-mistress, and in much less than three years you would have been pestered into changing your faith." "You think I have no strength of mind. You may be right," she added, looking at me and then around her and sighing. "But remember, my darling, what you have written to me. What was the name now of mam'selle's confessor?" "Père Jerome." "Well, on your own showing, wasn't this Father Jerome ceaseless in his importunities?" "Yes. Mam'selle was repeatedly leaving me alone with him under one excuse or another. He sent me books--I was taken to mass--only yesterday morning mam'selle lost her temper with me, and quite made me understand that her orders from Aunt Amelia were to convert me, _coûte que coûte_--" "Then," cried I, interrupting her once more, hot with the irritation that had again and again visited me when I read her letters where she complained of the behaviour of mam'selle and this Father Jerome; "is there any mortal of our faith, I care not what may be his or her theories of human propriety, who could pronounce against us for acting as we have? My contention is, your aunt is not a proper guardian for you. If it were your father or your mother--both Protestants, whose spirits, looking down upon you, we are bound to believe, would wish you to live and die Protestant to the heart as they were! But Lady Amelia Roscoe!--the most wretched mixture that can be imagined, of bigotry and worldliness, her head stuffed full of priests and dress, of beads and balls--" I broke off to kiss away a tear, and a little later she was smiling with her hand in mine, as I led her up on deck. The mistiness had gone out of the sunlight, the pearly, vaporous curls--faint of hue as the new moon beheld in the day--which had given a look of marble to the sky, had melted out or been settled by the breeze over to the English coast, and now the heavens were a pale blue, piebald with bodies of white vapour streaming up out of the south and touching the green and creaming stretch of waters with shadows of violet. There was more warmth in the sun than I should have looked for at that time of the year, and I speedily made Grace comfortable in a chair, a little distance from the tiller--in other words, out of earshot of the helmsman; I snugged her in rugs, and Caudel further sheltered her by what he called a hurricane house--a square of canvas "seized" above the line of the bulwark rail.