It is to be noticed that Mr Trenchard had not selected Miss Amelia Ashley, the nearest to his hand, for the typical Englishwoman of his unflattering comparison. He had not forgotten that Amelia was half French. Yet many people were disposed to do so, though over the drawing-room mantelpiece at Ashley Court hung the grave, gentle face of Caroline de Sesmaisons, whom an impetuous Englishman had met in Paris in his _Wanderjahr_, had wooed and won in forty-eight hours (defeating her parents in an ensuing three months of hard fighting), and had carried off, still knowing nothing but her native tongue, to Suffolk, where she had lived, gracious and idolised, through a short but singularly happy married life. Not even the fact, abhorrent to Sir William, that his children must needs be brought up as Roman Catholics, had disturbed his felicity. He had faced this contingency when he married Mademoiselle de Sesmaisons, and Lady Ashley never had cause to complain of breach of faith. She herself repaired to her duties at Fountainhall Manor, the home of one of the very few old Romanist families in East Anglia, which was visited at intervals by a mission priest. The crux had come when she died. But Sir William was a man of his word, and her memory was too dear to him for outrage. The children (George was seven, Amelia three years younger) should continue to be brought up as Papists. But after two or three years (and it was impossible for Sir William not to regard it as the direct interposition of Providence) Fountainhall Manor, on the death of its octogenarian owner, passed into other hands; there was no one to instruct the children in their mother’s faith, and no chapel at which they could attend its services. So they accompanied their father to the parish church, little brands plucked from the burning, and sat very sedately under the Rector, lifting their infant voices in unison with Sir William’s, though not always with the choir. When George came of age his father, with great solemnity and a dreadful sinking of the heart, asked him whether he would be a Romanist or an Anglican. The youth not unnaturally chose the Established Church, and Amelia, when her turn came, made the same decision. So all was comfortably for the best, and the detested name of “Rome” had no more need to be mentioned within the walls of Ashley Court.