“Pardon me! my belief was limited to your being frightened! I can’t believe that the person to whom you were talking with so much animation and intimacy was a stranger to you, nor that you mistook him for a beggar.”
She drew her breath heavily, and to his relief did not repeat her asseveration.
“Whom do you suppose that he was? Have you any idea?”
“I am afraid that I have a very good one.”
The gravity of his answer was tinged with such a disgusted reluctance, that Bonnybell’s heart, not really at all recovered from its late intensity of fear, stood still. Loathsome old Charlie! She had always known that he would be the death of her! Would it be better to tell the truth now? No! the truth was always a mistake for people like her, who had to live by their wits. The truth was, like motors and tiaras, only for the well-off! But she must express some curiosity; put the question to which she already knew the answer so fatally well.
“Whom?”
“I hardly like to insult you by saying so; but I believe the man to whom you were talking to have been Colonel Landon.”
Her answer came without apparent delay; yet three alternatives had raced through her head before she adopted it. “Shall I deny it flat? It is impossible that by this light he could have recognized him; he owned that he did not: it is just a trap to catch me! Shall I pretend never to have heard of Charlie? By this time Edward knows that I am not very innocent, so that will never do? Shall I just give a great start of indignation, and begin to walk home very fast?”
The last project was adopted, and at once put into execution. So well done was it, that it was a self-reproachful Edward, fearful of having done a grave wrong, who came up alongside of the fleeing victim to appearances.
“If I was mistaken, I can never ask your pardon enough. I was mistaken?”