Camilla received this graceful parry with a puzzled “Humph!” adding presently—
“It does not seem to strike you that there is an injustice in punishing the man for what he has not done.”
“Punishing him!” repeated Miss Ransome, in a tone of startled anguish. “Oh no, I am only giving him a little pain now, to save him a great deal of pain later.”
The baffled keenness on Camilla’s face grew more acute, and its young object was also made aware by some sixth sense that Edward’s acumen was also at fault through this new double in a course that had never run particularly straight.
“You must have had an uncommonly unpleasant three days,” Mrs. Tancred remarked, after a ruminating space, “to be so anxious to loose what before you were so determined to grasp.”
Bonnybell could have spared these repeated allusions to the methods by which her conquest had been achieved, but she took it beautifully, and with gentle head drooped.
“That is true. Whatever happens to me in the future, I do not think I can well have a bitterer cup to drink than what they have held to my lips for the last three days.”
A caught breath in one direction and a fidgeted foot in another here assured Miss Ransome that her simple oratory had told, and she hastened to go on striking while the iron was hot.
“It was not only this last blow,” she said, with a long shuddering sigh, “but all along they took pleasure in humiliating me, in showing up my ignorance and my foolishness—Heaven knows it was easy enough—and they were glad and ready to believe evil—even such unbelievable evil as this—of me!”
A mental gloss followed this last statement. “I am speaking truth, in a way; it is unbelievable that any mother could have taken her daughter to M——’s; and even poor Claire would not have done it if she had not been even less herself than usual that night.”