“Down in the world?”
“Yes; isn’t she? Isn’t she very mal vue? And I am so down in the world myself, that it is not for me, of all people, to be hard on her!”
Perhaps the whole success of Miss Ransome’s not very artistic falsehoods lay in the poignant flashes of truth that she unintentionally lit up their darkness with, here and there. No hearer could doubt the reality of her desolate fellow-feeling for the social outcast with the golden wig, concerning whom Mr. Tancred had just been hearing something that made him feel that flaying alive would be too lenient a fate for her.
“It is no question of Lady Tennington,” he interrupted with a cold severity, “but of the person who left you so suddenly as soon as he saw me.”
“Did not I tell you—I thought I had—that he was a perfect stranger to me? that I had never seen him before? He jumped out of the trees, as I was passing! Oh, how frightened I was!”
A perfectly unaffected shudder told the listener that here again was a stratum of unalloyed truth.
“You do believe me, don’t you?”
“I believe that you were frightened.”
Had poor Miss Ransome remembered a certain fact, she would not here have lifted her clasped hands, nor would Edward have had the pain of seeing the glint of unfamiliar diamonds on one of them, showing her up by moonlight.
“Thank you so much! Of course I know that appearances are against me; and if, as you say, that man”—another shudder—“wore a fur coat, I suppose he could not have been a real beggar. But if you believe me——”