It was in vain for the young creature so agreeably apostrophized to hug her favourite maxim that “hard words break no bones.” It began at this point to escape from her rather convulsive embrace. Two salt drops hung unshed on the lengthy eyelashes—one of her most uncommon beauties—of her lower lids.
“Do not you pity me a little too?” she said with half a sob.
“You!”
The lightning must have struck her that time. She felt as if she were black all down one side. The tears dried up on her lids.
“I had only just begun to lessen your and Mr. Tancred’s dislike for me,” she said, not as if in complaint, but with humble acquiescence in an accepted fact; “and now I have to face a whole hostile family, all of whom dislike and disapprove me more than even you can do!”
Nothing could be less civil than the “That would be difficult!” here interjected; but Miss Ransome had a closer acquaintance with her judge’s character than when once before she had stood a criminal at that judge’s awful bar, and an instinct telling her that the rudeness of the ejaculation possibly had its rise in the suspicion of a temptation to leniency under her own disarming oratory, encouraged her to proceed.
“Don’t you think I am to be pitied for knowing that, if I were to search high and low, I could never in the whole length and breadth of the land find a family who would be ready to welcome me into it?”
“They would certainly be very oddly constituted if they were.”
The comment was even more stinging than its predecessor; yet Bonnybell’s fine ear detected a little uncertainty in its brutality.
“Yes,” she answered, with a little ring of miserable humiliation in her tone, “you are right. Wherever I go, I must force myself; nobody in their senses would hold open their arms to me.”