To a casual observer all would have seemed as before, but a nicer eye would have detected that Mrs. Tancred had not resumed her labours on the nightly sweater. She sat looking straight before her with knit brows for some good while before she at last opened her mouth to utter slow and evidently well-weighed words.
“If you have told me the truth”—oh, why that cruel preamble?—“I think, as I have already said, that your course was the abstractly right one. Worldly wisdom would, of course, have dictated a more conciliatory line of action. To be on terms of open hostility with your husband’s family will not conduce to the happiness of your married life.”
At the beginning of this harangue Bonnybell had sat straight up in her chair to mark her respect by an attitude of close attention. Her hands now clutched the arms till her knuckle-bones stood out through the white skin.
“But I shall not have any married life,” she sighed in a trembling tone that yet seemed to mean what it said.
“Not have any married life!” repeated Mrs. Tancred, with such an accent as made Miss Ransome wonder whether the words could indeed be her own. “I am quite at a loss. I thought I understood you to say that your fiancé” (never since his clandestine courtship had the young man been Toby)—“that your fiancé did not share his family’s suspicions?”
“He does not, he does not!” cried Bonnybell, in a sort of half-real, half-bogus rapture. “He is absolutely stanch. He would marry me to-night if he could. Oh, it is something to have one person believe in you like that; but it is I who, after what has happened, will not marry him.”
CHAPTER XXII
The hour was late before the junta that sat upon Miss Ransome’s affairs of the heart separated for the night.
“Not marry him,” Camilla had repeated, with a terrible trenchancy, “after all that has happened—after the way in which you pursued him?”
Miss Ransome waived, with wise magnanimity, discussion of the unflattering phrase.