The stodgy face had lit up, and the vigour of its owner’s vernacular found an echo in Miss Ransome’s inmost soul.
“A beastly old reprobate!” Oh, if Toby knew all! Yet caution and the dread of Charlie’s vengeance, and his power of revelation, prompted her to say—
“I knew him when I was a child, and I should not like to hurt his feelings. But I am a little afraid that he will want to take me back to Stillington in the motor, and—and—it is a brougham!”
A quarter of an hour later Bonnybell was flashing homeward alone, having accidentally happened to mention to the preserver, whom she had successfully enlisted in her service, the fact of her passionate fondness for wandering in parks at winter gloamings, and having received from him in return information of almost excessive accuracy as to those parts of the Stillington Deer Park which might be safely visited at that time of year by a solitary stroller.
CHAPTER XVI
All was safe. There had been no change of plan on the part of Miss Ransome’s protectors, as, drawing a long breath, she realized on reaching home, and joyfully found the house as destitute of its masters as she had left it. To begin at once the attack upon the servants’ clemency was her next care. Bonnybell had always been charming in her manner towards all dependants; but the tone in which she now asked the butler after a sick wife whom Camilla had been doctoring, and told the housemaid, whom she found lighting her bedroom fire, how concerned she was to hear her still coughing, would have wiled “the savageness out of a bear.”
Her neglected studies were her next thought, but an unconquerable distaste towards resuming them made her persuade herself that it would be unsafe to run the risk of being found studying at so unusual an hour, and would lead to the inference that she had been playing the truant earlier. It would be better to take the least evadable books up to bed with her, and make what scrambling preparation she could before going to sleep. While collecting her authors, the young student became aware of “L’Enigme du Péché” lying in tell-tale openness on the floor, where it had evidently lain since it fell off her lap in the hurry of her departure. Another sigh of relief, almost as deep as the first, signalized this timely discovery.
Camilla was in unusually good spirits at dinner that night. Her day, though she was strictly silent upon that part, had been tiring, boring, self-sacrificing. It had been devoted wholly to the unhealthy, the unprosperous, and the ungrateful. But apparently it had had a tonic effect, and she ate her slender allowance of food with more apparent enjoyment, and talked more and more cheerfully, than usual. Perhaps it was because she talked more that Edward seemed to talk less than his never garrulous custom.
Bonnybell could wish that Mrs. Tancred’s inclination to converse would have led her in another direction than inquiries as to the mode in which she, Bonnybell, had disposed of her solitary day, though those inquiries were made almost genially, and in the spirit of neither a school-mistress nor a spy. It was not that the girl was conscious of any new or even nascent disinclination for fibbing; but when the whole field of invention lay open before her, it was so difficult to know which lie to choose. Lie she must, from beginning to end of the catechism that ensued, but she had no wish to be excessive, nor to daub where one coat of paint would serve her purpose. It was a pity that the servants had to hear her, as, of course, they must be laughing in their sleeves; but the tips to be administered doubled themselves in her intention, and she tried to forget the silent presences that might become so ruinously vocal.
“Did you make up your mind to tear yourself from the fireside at all to-day?”