“No.” There was a slight inflection of chilly surprise in his monosyllable.
“I do not think that you have been there since the day you kindly took me to tea?”
“No?” The monosyllable was interrogative this time, and seemed discouragingly to ask what the drift of these idle remarks might be.
“I think I have understood that you always used to go there every Sunday afternoon?”
It was on the edge of his lips to say carelessly that he believed he did call on the Aylmers now and then; but with a timely realization of the necessity of giving her the example of a rigid truthfulness he answered, still with that daunting air of cold wonder as to her purpose in putting the question, that such had been his weekly habit.
“You will forgive me if I am mistaken,” she said, with a half-frightened meekness that would have wiled “the savageness out of a bear,” “but I have sometimes been afraid that I had come between you and your friends.”
She had hit the nail so exactly on the head, that the nearest approach to denial of her suggestion within his reach was a “You?” that sounded to himself a contemptible paltering with the truth, and to her a cold snubbing of her presumption.
“I am not so silly as to dream that any liking for me was your motive,” Bonnybell went on with an exquisite humility. “Why should you like me? What is there to like in me?” (The question was accompanied by a sorrowful smile which evoked within its executor the reflection, “If that harrowing contortion does not fetch him, I may as well shut up shop!”) “But I feared that perhaps your generosity had resented their unnecessarily harsh treatment of such a forlorn creature!”
Answer to this speech would in any case have been difficult, and apparently Edward found it more than difficult, impossible, for he made none; and with a more dragging tone and a heavier spirit Miss Ransome took up her apparently useless little parable.
“If I am mistaken, I can only ask you to forgive me—I am always having to ask people to forgive me—but I could not bear the idea of coming between you and—people you are fond of.”