"Naturally," Ermengarde assented. "What inventive power!" she thought. "By the way," she added suddenly, "Ivor is not a very common name, and Miss Boundrish was once engaged to an Ivor, who knew you. This might be the same man."
"Miss Boundrish engaged to Ivor! Oh! how funny!" Agatha laid down her toy bellows as if to enjoy the visionary relationship, laughing quietly to herself. "Miss Boundrish! But an Ivor who knew me! What on earth has that girl been romancing about me?"
Ermengarde studied the leaves in the bottom of her cup, and smiled sadly over human infirmity. The pot is always calling the kettle, and not only the kettle, but even the silver tea-pot—black.
"What a dangerous girl," continued Agatha. "In a house like this, too. And how very unlucky that she saw you at tea with M. Isidore yesterday."
"And pray why should I not have tea with the boy?" Ermengarde demanded with sudden dignity.
"Why not, indeed? But—please don't think me impertinent or intrusive, dear Mrs. Allonby"—she spoke with a sort of childlike appeal and affection—"the most innocent and obvious things are not always wise, especially in a world in which unmuzzled Boundrishes run about loose."
She looked so guileless, so sweet, so tenderly pleading; her eyes uplifted to Ermengarde's had the transparent candour of a child's; there was a tremulous diffidence about her mouth that went to Ermengarde's heart. A woman who could invent aunts and male connexions by marriage on the spur of the moment, who wrote and received surreptitious letters in cipher—only that afternoon she had been perusing one by the fire, when Ermengarde opened her eyes after a doze, and had quickly pocketed it on discovering that she was watched.
"Boundrishes," continued the woman of mystery, not blenching under the searching gaze upon her, "are—not that this one means any harm, it's only vanity and silliness—they are unconscious gossip-conductors and accumulators combined; they are always discharging whatever happens to have come into their heads, and nothing ever seems to go in quite straight, and all comes out enlarged and distorted."
"Dear Miss Somers, I congratulate you on your truly serpentine wisdom. How did you manage to acquire it?"
"Women who get their own living have to keep their eyes open, else they go down. I sometimes wonder if you realize what the actual position of this young Isidore is, Mrs. Allonby?"