The interrogation was so urgent, yet so apologetic, that somehow the bang-out lie that she had ready died on the fugitive’s lips. Perhaps the evasion to which she resorted was not much more really truthful.
“I do not know what I have done”—by this time art had advised, and nature had readily supplied tears—“that you should accuse me of being friends with such a man”—“as Charlie” was on the edge of her lips; but the misleading diminutive was arrested just in time. “Of course, I do not know what he has done, but I know that everybody, except Flora, cuts him. How could you imagine that I could like such a detestable old beast, or want to meet him?”
In the application of the strong noun applied to Flora’s protégé there was such intense heartiness that Edward’s relief deepened.
“If I have been mistaken, how can I ever beg your pardon enough?” he said with a horrified accent of remorse, she posting along beside him, sobbing in the moonlight. “I must have been the victim of a preconceived idea and a fancied likeness. But I have just been hearing that that person had been staying for the last fortnight or more at Tennington; and I unhappily could not forget that you had been reduced to—to invention to hide the fact of your visit there.”
The links in the chain of evidence were closely knit. Yet there was hope as well as apology in his tone—hope of a denial as emphatic as her expression of distaste had been.
But Miss Ransome had already begun to repent of an outspokenness so foreign to her usual methods. “If Charlie ever heard that I called him a detestable old beast, it would be all up with me.”
They had by this time crossed the plank bridge that parted park from pleasure-grounds. The sluggish river, by which her bored feet had so often stepped, gleamed beside the path ennobled by moonlight; and Bonnybell began to feel safer. In this extremely tight place she must invoke the subtlest diplomacy to her aid. The high line of injured innocence which a few minutes ago had seemed out of the question, now, thanks to Edward’s changed and humbled attitude, appeared more practicable than any other, and without delay she adopted it.
“It is the want of trust,” she sighed, her head bowed on her chest, and one brilliant tear deftly shaken off on to her muff—“the absolute want of trust, that is what does the mischief.”
“Have you given me much cause to trust you?” he asked sadly.
To this question she found it not convenient to respond directly, but she resumed her melancholy rhetoric.