'And does she approve of the Settlement?' He could not forbear the question. The girl blushed and shook her head, smiling. 'Of course not. She feels about the Settlement much as you do, only she thinks all that sort of work ought to be left to nuns. But Mrs. Robinson persuaded the Mother Superior of the convent where I was brought up, to write and tell Aunt Theresa that she might at least let me try and see if I could do what Penelope proposed.' 'I think that Penelope has had decidedly the best of the bargain,' Wantley rejoined dryly; for now, looking at his companion with new eyes of solicitude, he saw the effects of that work which he also thought might well be left to nuns, or at any rate to women older than Cecily. But he was somewhat taken aback when, encouraged by the kindly glance, his young companion exclaimed impulsively, 'Why are you--what makes you--so unfair to Penelope? And why have you always refused to have anything to do with the Settlement?' Wantley turned and looked at her rather grimly. 'So ho!' he said to himself, 'my shortcomings have evidently been revealed. That's too bad!' And then, aloud, he answered, quite gravely, 'If I am unfair to my cousin--I mean, of course, unduly so--she is suffering for the sins of her parents, or perhaps I should say of her father, by whom, as you are possibly aware, I was adopted in a sort of fashion after the death of my mother.' Cecily looked at him surprised. To her apprehension, the great Lord Wantley had been one of those men who, in another and a holier age, might well have been canonized. Of Lady Wantley she knew, or thought she knew, less--indeed, they had never met till the evening before; but, while admitting to herself her own complete lack of comprehension of the older woman's peculiar religious views, Cecily was prepared to idealize her in the double character of the famous philanthropist's widow and as Penelope's mother. But Wantley, his easy-going nature now singularly moved and stirred, was determined not to spare her. In short, dry sentences he told her of his happy childhood, of his father's conversion to the Catholic faith, followed shortly after by that now ruined father's death. Of Lord Wantley's reluctant adoption of him, coupled with a refusal to give him the education he had himself received, and which is, in a sense, the birthright of certain Englishmen.