A distinctly emotional pause ensued, which Camilla, with a movement of the shoulders as of one shaking off an unwelcome burden, broke.
“Come,” she said brusquely, “this will not do. You must not try to work upon our feelings. For once in your life you have been the aggrieved person. I own that I cannot myself comprehend”—drawing up her bony figure with a scornful dignity that for once made it seem beautiful in Bonnybell’s eyes—“stooping to notice any accusation that took so low a form as an anonymous letter; but we must not allow ourselves to be led away into an exaggeration of feeling. After all, the whole thing rests upon a misconception. They are good and conscientious people.” (Miss Ransome was glad to verify that to make this admission cost Camilla what is vulgarly called a “swallow.”) “When your innocence is proved, they will be the first to own themselves in the wrong.”
“How can it be proved?” answered Bonnybell, dejectedly. “How can any one rebut a charge that comes one does not know whence, and one does not know why?” The falsehood came more easily this time, but prudence and something, too, of authentic feeling bid it not stand alone. “I would not thank them for believing in me when my innocence was proved. The people I love and bless are those who believe in me first, and do without proof.”
The description, though perhaps not quite accurately fitting her present audience, was obviously meant to cover them, and it was not very harshly that Camilla repressed this new excursion into the realms of the emotional.
“If it is false,” she said, not unkindly, though without any direct acknowledgment of Bonnybell’s magnificent compliment to her own and her husband’s credulity, “you have only to wait, and it will die of itself. It is the essence of the false to perish.” (“That is a bad look-out for me,” thought Bonnybell, humorously, but she only bowed her head.) “The very monstrousness of the accusation”—indignation gave an unwonted quiver to the speaker’s voice—“will kill it the more quickly, and even if it takes time, you can well afford to wait. A year, two years, might make you a little less grossly unfit for the duties of a wife and mother than you are now.”
Again Bonnybell bowed her head, and across Edward’s memory there flashed in ludicrous incongruity the recollection of Miss Ransome’s views on maternity, as slightly but graphically sketched for his own benefit a few days earlier.
“I have always heard that there is nothing so wearing as a long engagement,” suggested Miss Ransome, presently, with much hesitancy—“nor so ruinous to the appearance,” she was about to add, but thought better of it.
The severity, singularly absent from her latest utterance, here showed signs of returning to Camilla’s eye and tone.
“I do not quite understand the drift of your remark. You cannot be suggesting the advisability of thrusting yourself into a family which would receive you in the spirit that characterizes the Aylmers’ present attitude towards you.”
“No,” replied Bonnybell, with a little heartbroken gesture of renunciation. “I meant that there is nothing for me but to give him up.”