Sister Catherine had repeated her request that Nancy should sing to them, especially as it was the feast of All Saints. So after practising with Sister Monica, who had charge of the music, she sang Mozart’s motet _Ave Verum Corpus_ at Benediction amid the glowing candles and white chrysanthemums of the little chapel. “Mother, you don’t often sing in church, do you?” Letizia asked. “Didn’t I sing well?” said her mother with a smile. “Yes, I expect you sang very well, but I thought it was a little loud, didn’t you? Sometimes it sounded like a man singing. I think you ought to be careful and not sing quite so loud, mother.” Luckily the nuns themselves enjoyed Nancy’s rich contralto a great deal more than did their pupils. The warmth of femininity spoke to their hearts of something that they had lost, or rather of something that most of them had never won. It was easy to understand and sympathise with the readiness of the nuns to turn away for a few minutes from the austere ecstasies of Gothic art to worship some dolorous “Mother” of Guido Reni. A flush had tinged their cheeks so virginally tralucent, as if a goblet of water had been faintly suffused by a few drops of red wine. Kenrick was at Victoria to see Nancy off next morning. Just as the train started, she leaned out of the window of her compartment and exclaimed breathlessly: “Please don’t think me ungrateful. I do appreciate tremendously what you are doing for me. Really, I do.” His long, sombre face lit up with a smile, and he waved his hand as Nancy withdrew from London into the train again. France dreamed in a serenity of ethereal blue. In the little wedding-cake cemeteries black figures were laying wreaths of immortelles upon the graves. Nancy remembered with a pang that it was All Souls’ Day and reproached her cowardice for not having laid flowers on Bram’s grave at Greenwich before she left England. The bunch of carnations with which Kenrick had presented her became hateful to hold, and she longed to throw it out of the window. She would have done so, if two English old maids had not been regarding her curiously from the other side of the compartment, the one above her Baedeker, the other above the _Church Times_. Why should elderly English women travelling abroad look like butterfly-collectors? “_Parlez vous anglaise?_” said one of them to the ticket-collector, nodding her head and beaming as if she were trying to propitiate an orang-utan. “Yes, I spik English, madame,” he said coldly after punching the tickets. The other elderly lady congratulated her companion upon the triumphant conversation. “He undoubtedly understood perfectly what you were saying, Ethel.” “Oh, yes, I think we shall get along capitally after a time. I was always considered very good at French in my schooldays, and it’s just beginning to come back to me.”