The little uplifted face was so touchingly, unresentfully sad, that Felicity decided with relief that the impression of hardly detectable amusement in it, received by her a minute ago, must have been an optical delusion.
“We shall both miss you very much,” she said with sincere cordiality. “When you are not impossible, you are as nice a little girl as one is likely to meet in a summer’s day. I have given you an excellent character, and all that you have got to do is to live up to it.”
“To live up to it!” repeated Bonnybell. “Will you mind telling me what you have said about me?”
Misgiving as to the height of the moral plane upon which Miss Ransome was warranted to move so obviously dictated this inquiry that Felicity laughed a little.
“I have said that you are as gay as a lark, to begin with. By-the-by”—with an air of bethinking herself—“if I were you I would not be too gay, just at first. Of course, I thoroughly understand that it argues no want of feeling on your part, and that the rebound is perfectly natural; but Camilla is very conventional.”
Miss Ransome bowed her head submissively under the blast of these somewhat contradictory counsels.
“Gay, but not too gay,” she said, softly; and once again an uneasy faint impression of infinitesimal mirth went like a whiff through Mrs. Glanville’s consciousness.
“I have told her how invaluable you have been to me at the ‘Happy Evenings.’ There I shall miss you cruelly”—with an unmistakable accent of sincerity. “Your knack of holding the girls’ attention and keeping them amused is really very remarkable; so different from poor Miss Sloggett”—with a disgusted backhander at a subordinate fellow-worker in the vineyard of philanthropy.
“Is Mrs. Tancred like you? Like you, I mean, in giving up her life to—to doing good?”
“She is not as active as she might be,” replied Felicity, with a modest regret at the poor figure cut by her sister-in-law in the path of mercy. “Camilla does not come forward as she ought to do; she has that silly horror which I cannot understand”—and, indeed, no one has ever suspected Felicity of it—“of seeing her name in print; but I believe”—magnanimously—“that in her humdrum way, and with the greatest precaution, lest any one should hear of it, she does a fair amount of good.”