The Saint and the Sinner Read Free

journey to London.
    As the Bishop went down the steps with Pandora beside him, he said quietly,
    “Try to please your aunt, my child, and do not get into any mischief while we are away from home.”
    “I will try, Uncle Augustus.”
    For a moment the Bishop’s eyes rested on his niece as if he appreciated the sunshine glinting on her fair hair and in her pansy-coloured eyes.
    Then a voice from inside the carriage said peremptorily,
    “Augustus! We should be on our way.”
    “Yes, of course, my dear.”
    The Bishop stepped in, a footman shut the door of the carriage, and the cavalcade started off in a manner which, Pandora thought, should have been heralded with a fanfare of trumpets.
    She watched them drive out of the courtyard and onto the short drive which led to the highway, and then she turned and went back into the Palace.
    They had gone!
    She was free, and yet any elation she might have felt was overshadowed by what she had just heard her uncle say.
    Not realising where her feet were carrying her, she walked into her uncle’s Study.
    It would have been a pleasant room if her aunt had not furnished it with mustard-coloured curtains and a carpet in which the same colour predominated, intermingled with various shades of brown.
    The room looked austere with no flowers, no touches of colour to relieve the sombreness of it.
    Yet the armchairs were well upholstered – for the Bishop liked his comfort – and his large desk was piled with papers, all of them neatly arranged.
    Pandora had the idea that she was filed in a category headed, “Pandora Stratton – Niece and Object of Charity.”
    ‘If I had any money,’ she thought, ‘I would go to London and find myself some employment and make myself independent.’
    It was an idea so revolutionary, so impractical, that she might just as well have thought of flying to the moon or living beneath the sea.
    The very little money her father had left had been taken over by her uncle, and she presumed it would be used for her trousseau and to provide a dowry for her marriage.
    Her marriage!
    Again the idea seemed to strike at her as if it were a knife.
    “What can I do? Oh, Papa, what can I do?” she asked aloud.
    She knew that her father and mother would never have forced her into marriage with a man she did not like.
    They had married in defiance of the Chart family, which had been horrified that one of their members should wish to marry someone so penniless and, to their minds, so unimportant as a Parson.
    But when they met Charles Stratton, a number of them, Lady Eveline later told her daughter, had understood.
    “Your father was such a handsome, attractive, and happy person,” she said. “I think my aunts, my cousins, and even grandmother, all of whom had disapproved, almost fell in love with him themselves!”
    That was not to say, Pandora knew, that they would have sacrificed their important position in the Social World as her mother had done to live in a small Vicarage, and be, with very little money, supremely happy.
    “Have you ever regretted marrying Papa?” Pandora had asked once.
    Her mother laughed.
    “Do I look as if I ever regretted being the happiest woman in the world?” she asked. “I adore your father and he adores me, and, what is more, we have an adorable daughter! Could any woman ask for more?”
    It had certainly never seemed to worry her mother that she could not do the things she had done when she was a girl.
    There was no question of going to London to Balls and parties in the Season or of accepting the invitations she occasionally received from the Prince Regent at Carlton House.
    Instead, she was quite content to make the small Vicarage comfortable and attractive for her husband, and to skimp and save on everything else so that they could afford to ride together in the summer and go hunting in the winter.
    It somehow did not seem incongruous that the horses which Charles Stratton had prized so much should have been responsible for his