“Listen, Noella,” she said, “you are nearly eighteen and you are intelligent enough to realise that some people do strange and perhaps wrong things in their lives. But that is their concern. Promise me that you will always try to do what is right and good.”
“But, of course, Mama.”
Her mother had spoken so earnestly that after a moment Noella enquired,
“It is your Cousin Caroline who is upsetting you, Mama, is it not? But why? Do you think it wrong of her to be so excited at seeing this gentleman?”
She thought for a moment or two that her mother was not going to reply.
Then she said,
“I love Caroline, as I have ever since we were children together, but you, dearest, have to understand that it was wrong of her to leave her husband and go away with a man she could not marry.”
She pause
