“I have taken the liberty of sending for you,” Tancred said, addressing Bonnybell with a cold perfection of politeness, “because Mr. Aylmer tells me that you have authorized him to give me a piece of news about you.”
Miss Ransome’s only immediate answer was to direct her beautiful eyes successively towards the faces of the two men who confronted her. Happily the thought behind them could not be read upon those pupils: “If it must be, I wish it could have been the other one.”
“It has rather taken me by surprise, as I did not know that you were acquainted.”
The tone in which the implied reproach was conveyed was of the gentlest, yet it bent the head of one of the culprits in a not wholly calculated expression of shame on her breast. It drove the other into blurted speech.
“The fault was entirely mine. Our first meeting in the park was purely accidental, wasn’t it?”
“Purely,” replied she, still keeping her head down, and wondering whether, considering the very minute instructions as to the direction of her walks, instilled into her by him at Tennington, her suitor could possibly be such a fool as to believe what he said.
“And after that—after that”—floundering a little, but still stout in defence of a cause of whose badness even he must be aware, “she was afraid of my people. No wonder, after the way they had treated her!”
At that she lifted an eye-beam of meek gratitude towards her advocate’s face, but it ended its journey on the other’s.
“If you had taken my wife and me into your confidence we might have helped you a little.”
Behind the perfect restraint and courtesy of his words, Bonnybell detected the profundity of his contempt for her methods. Had they been alone she would have tried to cajole him into a more lenient view of her, but the presence of that stodgy pillar of defence—beefy was, to speak truth, the epithet that his love internally applied to him—which would henceforth for ever be interposed between her and all assailants, kept her silent.