“She was always getting herself talked about,” she remarked. “First there was that affair with the prince; everyone was talking about her speaking to him in French--in French, mind--for more than an hour.” (Mrs. Caffyn seemed to have acquired the impression that a conversation in French could scarcely fail to possess some of the elements of the dialogue in a French vaudeville, and she had heard enough about that form of composition to make her distrustful of its improving qualities.) “And then,” she went on, “there came all that horrid business about her marriage--the arrest of the man, you know, and all that. The next thing was the trial, where her name was mentioned in the hearing of all the common people--witnesses and people of that class--in the court. Later on there was the heroic drowning of the man, and then her marriage to Mr. Wingfield within a few months, and the electioneering business--I really think that she should have been more discreet than to get herself talked about so frequently. As for her present escapade, I can only say that it seems to me to be the crowning indiscretion of her life.” But the Reverend Mr. Caffyn, who had been talking to his patroness, Mrs. Bowlby-Sutherst, about Priscilla, was disposed to take the view of an easy-going looker-on at the world and its ways from a lesser altitude than that of his pulpit; and he smiled at Priscilla’s resolution to remain at the Manor. He did not think that it mattered much just then. Had she not married young Wingfield in good faith, and had they not been going about together ever since? he asked. He had in his mind, though his wife did not know it, the saying of the wicked witty Frenchwoman who had accepted the legend of the King’s making quite a promenade when deprived of his head, on the plea that, after all “_c’est le premier pas qui coûte_.” And so his daughter had no hesitation in paying her visit to the Manor. It was when she was going through the gates that she recollected how Priscilla had talked to her upon that morning long ago at this same place. What had she said? Was it not that if she were to love a man truly she would not allow any considerations of morality or any other convention to keep her apart from him? Rosa wondered if there really was anything in the theory which was held by some people, to the effect that sometimes a judgment followed hard upon the utterance of a thoughtless phrase. She wondered if the publicity in which Priscilla was now moving had been sent to her as a punishment for her impulsive words. Perhaps it was the atmospheric envelope, so to speak, of this thought which remained hanging about her in the house and prevented her visit to her dear friend from being all that she expected it to be. It was of course a delightful reunion; but somehow Priscilla did not seem to be just the same as she had been long ago.