“I am going to the Dower House.”
Neither of her auditors hazarded a comment, but the sinking heart of one of them inquired of itself, “Does she mean to take me with her?” There was a pause as of Nature between two thunderbolts.
“I am going to ask pardon of my friends.” Edward was apparently run out of his stock of “yeses,” and the white face of the object of Camilla’s apologies dropped towards its heaving chest. The whiteness was partly artificial, due to an annoyed comment by the artist on her own carmines at an earlier period of the morning. (“I am incorrigibly rosy! One ought never to be pink at a crisis! I can do it so that even without her spectacles she will not be able to detect it!”) “And, moreover, I wish to find out what their attitude will be towards——”
She paused before the name of Bonnybell, as before an unclean word with which she was unwilling to sully her lips. The unclean word lifted up its little pitiful voice.
“Will you ask them just to give me a chance?”
Instinct dictated to her the phrase in its undefended humility; and though the ungracious “It is no part of my mission to be your messenger!” could hardly be said to be encouraging, Miss Ransome felt that she had struck the right note. She was alone with Edward for one moment in the hall before his diurnal departure.
“How I wish you were back!” she cried in such a subdued plaint, as seemed forced out of her maiden reticence in spite of her.
“Do you?” He could only hope that the surprise he tried to throw into his words was more perceptible to her ear than the emotion that entered into them without any throwing.
“Yes, I do. I suppose that, in my dire need, I catch at straws.”
The phrase went with him through the day.