Nor was her submission able to redeem her popularity. The very fact of having once had ‘notions’ was enough to mark her out for ever as a traitor to the Constitution of St. Eldred’s. She was no longer quite ‘one of themselves.’ The excommunication was pronounced by those terrible princesses, the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd, and no one was found to question its justice as it thundered across the tea-table. Inquiries were made into her remote ancestry, and it was soon found that, though by birth an unblemished Blessing, yet she had inherited the sinister tendencies of a Messiter great-great-great-grandmother, whom history convicted of eccentricities that went the length of reading her Bible in French. From such a tainted spring what purity could be expected? The situation was summed up by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. The stream cannot rise higher than its source, was their stern pronouncement. A regretful loyalty, a disapproving adherence now marked the family’s attitude towards her--a loyalty, an adherence as faithful but as disapproving as ever a virtuous believer in Divine right can have felt for a drunken and profligate Pretender, or a patriotic Catholic for Queen Elizabeth. So far, it is true, her eldest son, James Dadd the Ninth, seemed a model of Dadd virtues. He had made no open move towards ostentation and prodigality. His younger brother Robert, however, was the incarnate tragedy of St. Eldred’s, the incarnate accusation of Mrs. Dadd’s regency. Briefly, this ulcer of St. Eldred’s must be skimmed; Robert Dadd had run away from home, and when next heard of, many years later, was understood to be in Japan, and to have become a Mormon or a Buddhist, or a disciple of whatever religion rules in those benighted parts. Never again was his name heard in St. Eldred’s, but the Messiter great-great-great-grandmother was held accountable for such a strange, terrible aberration--the first break in the impeccable succession of the Dadds. There was yet another child--a daughter--but she was ten years younger than her brothers, and could not as yet prove, in her own person, the corrupt heredity of her mother. However, she was already watched with care, and every tearing of her pinafore was held symptomatic of inherited depravity.