This wonder was expressed with apparently such perfect good faith, and such deferential asking for light, that Felicity—never very hardhearted, and possessed, in this case, by some slight inward compunction—abandoned her judicial attitude.
“Between ourselves,” she said, in a confidential tone, “there is very little that the jeune fille of to-day does not say; but Camilla is not of to-day.”
“And is he—Mr. Tancred—not of to-day either?”
Felicity thought a moment. “Edward? No, Edward is not of to-day either. Edward is of no particular day; if anything, he has strayed out of the Middle Ages.”
The phrase, as applied to the person in question, had no particular meaning; but Mrs. Glanville admired her brother, and it sounded picturesque.
“We shall make an odd jumble of periods between us!”—still more hopelessly than before. “Oh”—with a sudden burst of clinging affection—“oh, how I wish that Mr. Glanville had allowed you to keep me permanently, as you were so dear and kind as to want to do.”
Miss Ransome’s delicate black arm was flung across her protectress’s knee, and her head and attendant black feathers were flopped down upon it; but she lifted her face soon enough to notice the expression that her aspiration had called up in Felicity’s countenance.
Mrs. Glanville had quite as soon that her young friend’s eyes had remained hidden, being conscious of a slight shade of confusion on the dial-plate of her own emotions, and a qualmy question flashed across her brain as to whether it was possible that in the very tail of the despairing orbs lifted to her, full of such unmistakable sorrowful gratitude, a tiny spark of contradictory mischief and mirth could lurk. Was it conceivable that the child—she was a terribly sharp child, and her vicious upbringing had made her still sharper—could have pricked the bladder, and detected the pious fraud of Tom’s supposed eagerness for her departure?
“You must not run away with the idea,” she said, with more flurry than approved itself to her own judgment—“you must not run away with the idea that Tom dislikes you.”
“Oh no, I am sure he does not”—with courteous hurry.