I couldn't help thinking some odd thoughts as I looked at one little panel of a stained window over my head. It showed a kneeling girlish figure, in white, with long yellow hair. On her right was a Bishop, coped and mitred, extending his hand; and on her left was a loutish leering fellow with a steel cap and a sword. I'm not ecclesiologist enough to know what it was all about. Possibly it meant the Soul being strengthened by the Sacraments against the onslaughts of the World. More probably it was in praise of some virgin martyr. But the odd thing was that if the yellow-haired, rather insipid damsel had had more colour in her cheeks she would have been the image of Susan. The large-mouthed, large-eared, large-limbed brute who was tempting or threatening her was not wholly unlike the cur at the Cheval d'Or. Most amazing and haunting of all, the Bishop, with his youthful, keen, honest, manly, wholesome, clean-shaven face, was simply a coped and mitred--Gibson!
Here they are, bringing the coffee in cups! Never mind. On Tuesday I shall be drinking it with a big Normandy soup-spoon out of a little Normandy bowl.
Coming away from High Mass at St. Rémi, we walked slap into him in the Grande Rue.
I could have boxed Susan's ears for her ridiculous goings-on. Such flushings and flutterings and scurryings can't possibly have been seen in the town before. Yet, as we came back to the Astor by the zigzaggest route I could find, she positively turned her head twice. Of course he was following.
I'm quite prepared to find he's secured the next table to mine for lunch.
What worries me isn't so much to-day's meetings. It's to-morrow's. If we can't dodge him at Dieppe, how shall we manage at Sainte Véronique? Then there's my ridiculous promise to our poor young Bishop Gibson.
I'm forced to acknowledge that Alice is right. I'm neither old enough nor wise enough to keep up Traxelby and go travelling abroad with no companion save Susan. It looks strange, and it doesn't work.
If this creature is indeed Lord Ruddington, I don't trust him to deal honestly by Susan. In that case, Gibson is just the man for the job. Once let me be sure that it's Ruddington and Gibson shall have his telegram within half an hour.