“If your statement is true——” Camilla began with a judicial slowness.
But Bonnybell, contrary to the humble politeness of her wont, broke in with a little cry.
“True? Would it be much use my telling an untruth when ‘they’ are so close by to show me up if I did?”
The logic was as sound as the veracity of the appeal was obvious, and the little cry was, and did the work of, more than a rhetorical flourish.
“If, as I am induced to think, you have stated the facts as they occurred,” began Mrs. Tancred again, with no apparent resentment of the interruption, “I confess that I do not think there was any course open to you but the one you adopted. For once in your life you seem to have behaved with decency and dignity.”
The concession, though not very graciously worded, was an enormous one, and the relief consequent upon it proportionately great, for poor Miss Ransome had been very, very far from sure of her reception.
“Then I may stay?” she faltered.
“Stay!” repeated her hostess, with an energy of scorn which warmed the inmost core of her silent husband’s heart towards her. “Do not ask preposterous questions.”
Thereupon the returned waif flung herself incontinently upon the rigid neck whose stiff ruffles and frills no fond daughter-arms had ever disarranged. The action bulked colossal to the executor of it in retrospect. “How could I have done it?” she asked herself in a cooler after-hour, looking back upon her feat as the man who in youth has mounted a cannon-swept, bayonet-bristling breach into a burning town may regard the feat from the armchair of placid old age. Of course, I had had a good deal to upset me, but I must have been off my head.
The embrace, if so one-sided a transaction could merit the name, did not last long. Bonnybell was curtly told to sit down and not make a fool of herself, and Camilla began almost at once to scold her; but yet it was with a sense of extreme well-being that the little gutter-snipe, as in frank soliloquy she often called herself, settled her lithe body into a familiar armchair. Edward had sat down too, and Jock, making up his mind that reparation for his wrongs was unaccountably not forthcoming to-night, stepped into his basket, which stood raised on its accustomed tripod to keep him from imaginary draughts. The girl might never have been away. Yet to herself what odious æons seemed to have rolled between her last and her present occupancy of the Hepplethwaite chair that now held her!