“It is for his sake,” she said, in sweet renunciation. “There can be no happiness in married life without confidence, as you have often told me, and since I seem to have enemies who stab me in the dark, this thing may happen again; and though he does not believe now, he may gradually grow to suspect that there may be something in it, and his people will work upon him till they persuade him that I am—what they think me.”
Her voice was broken, and her air so much that of the widowed dove, that it took her hearers a minute or two to disentangle the cool common sense of her utterances from its emotional fringes and tags.
“You seem to be ready to give up rather easily what you stuck at nothing to secure,” Camilla said, in a voice of vexed puzzledom; and Edward’s voice raised itself for almost the first time in one of those tentative utterances that always gave the impression of his thinking everybody’s opinion more valuable than his own—
“It does not strike you that it is rather hard on Toby?”
Miss Ransome turned on this diffident new interlocutor eyes glorified by a lofty self-abnegation.
“He will think so now,” she said, “but in ten years he will thank me.”
“I have known more unlikely things than that happen,” Camilla said caustically, “and there is more sense and rationality in what you say than what I have hitherto thought you capable of; but still, if you are sincerely attached to the man—and I suppose that, after having sacrificed so much in the way of delicacy to gain his affections, you must at least be fond of him?”
She paused, leaving her sentence unbalanced, with an evident intention of obtaining an answer to its first half before proceeding to the second.
Bonnybell hesitated a moment. Even if she had been enamoured of her Toby, she would have much preferred not to say so before Edward, and things being as they were—— However, she got out of the dilemma fairly well.
“Need I answer that question?” she asked, with virgin reticence.