“Not the slightest!”—with wounded emphasis. “How should I? I did not know”—with innocent sorrow—“that I had an enemy in the world.”
A diversion was here effected by the fact that Edward, usually so quiet and noiseless, by some awkward movement of his foot displaced one of the fire-irons, which fell rattling from its andiron on to the hearth, before which the master of the house was standing.
Bonnybell’s heart, though in a certain sense a stout one, sank. “He knows that it was Charlie!” she said internally. “I was afraid that he must connect the letter with that unlucky episode in the park! Well, since I have begun, I must go on—‘in for a penny, in for a pound;’ and, after all, it is nearly all truth that I am telling.”
“It came by the afternoon post,” she continued, confining the appealing tragedy of her eyes to her female auditor for the present, as being the easier field of action. “I saw at dinner-time that something must have happened, they were so cold to me; not”—in plaintive, though not accusatory parenthesis—“that they have ever been anything else. Miss Barnacre kept talking all the time about—adventuresses”—the speaker’s sunk voice made a slight shamed pause before the last word—“and Catherine was like ice!”
A long sighing breath bore on its wings this last cruel reminiscence; no other sound broke upon it, and it was with a heartened sense that the air was getting warmer that the narrator presently went on with her narrative.
“Toby did all he could to prevent their showing it to me; he at least believed in me. I am afraid their doing it in spite of him will make a sad quarrel between them”—another sigh—“but they thought it right I should know; perhaps it was.”
Miss Ransome paused on the meek acquiescence in injury of this note.
“I suppose that they thought it their duty to give you an opportunity of clearing yourself,” Camilla said, in a voice whose chronic severity was tempered by some unusual relaxing of its harshness, “but for myself I should have put such a thing into the fire.”
“They gave it to me in the drawing-room after dinner. There were only Mrs. Aylmer, and Catherine, and Miss Barnacre there. I thought they need not have had Miss Barnacre; but you know how she always gives her opinion about everything, even about your religious views.” Bonnybell sank her voice at this last proof of the Barnacre’s presumption, and was rewarded by hearing a muffled snort of contempt from the direction of Mrs. Tancred. “I could not make anything of it at first, never having seen the handwriting before.” (O Bonnybell! why the inartistic superfluity of this touch?) “I asked what it meant.”
“Yes?”