She held to the same text through the hour and a half during which the debate lasted, although listening with the most attentive and sorrowing mildness to all the arguments that could be adduced on the other side.
Arrived at the haven of her own room, she cast herself on the bed, and kissed it hysterically. “Was ever any one so glad to be back anywhere as I am to be here?” she sighed out. “Oh, what a three days! Did ever any one before go through three such days? I thought at the beginning of them that I had as tough a hide as most people. But oh, in five minutes they were through it. Barnacre, Catherine, shall I ever get their needles out of my skin?”
She turned over on her face for a moment or two to bury the memory of those poisoned pricks in the soothing softness of that hospitable pillow, then sat up on the edge of the bed, with her legs dangling, while her reflections took a less painful turn. “I suppose there is some truth in what poor Claire used to say, that all respectable women are ill-natured.”
She ruminated awhile upon this wise, witty, and tender saying of her departed parent. Then her thoughts returned to fact, from their excursion into theory. “And to think that Charlie should have turned out a blessing in disguise! Without the help of his blackguardly letter—what an unspeakable sweep he is—how could I ever have got out of the impasse? Toby would never have let me go. Even now I should not be surprised at his putting a bullet into me to-morrow, as one is always seeing in the papers that grooms do to faithless kitchen-maids, when I give him his final congé. Well, that would be the end, and the dear old camel and Edward would be rid of their incubus. Poor Toby! How sea-sick the mere thought of him makes me! How very sincerely I dislike men!”
By this time she had jumped down from the bed and strolled to the cheval-glass. “I ought to do better—much better—than Toby,” she said, appraising her reflection. “Of course, the last three days have ravaged me and added five years to my age, but that is only temporary. I shall probably go on improving up to twenty-five, and Toby has so very much less in his power to settle than I at first understood, and he unwisely let me see that he meant to keep me ten months of the year in the country. I am sorry to play into the hands of that detestable Barnacre, but it is really all for the best.”
With this piously optimistic reflection on her lips, she fell sweetly asleep. It was not the winter dawn, nor the voice of the tea-bearing housemaid, that awoke her. The electric light full on her eyes, shot her back from the land where all things are forgotten, into a consciousness that was at first but semi. Some one was standing over her, and a voice was in her ears, uttering sounds which presently resolved themselves into words.
“You need not pretend to be asleep; I was taken in once, but it is useless to try and deceive me a second time.”
Bonnybell sat up, hazily blinking, still only half outside the gateway of sleep, and gradually realized that the form towering above her in the grimness of its snuff-coloured toga, and the inexorability of its dragged-back grey hair, was no other than Camilla.
“Is there anything wrong?” she asked, rubbing her sleepy eyes with her knuckles—a delicious gesture for once perfectly natural. “Is it a fire, or burglars, or what?” The empire of slumber was still too strong for there to be anything but misty indifference to the calamities suggested in the speaker’s tone. Then, with a spring back into full consciousness, and a frightened opening wide of the startled eyes, “Toby cannot have come already?”
“My conscience would not let me rest,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a ruthless lack of apology for her intrusion, and a still incomplete belief in the genuineness of the drowsiness so ably presented. “Reflecting afterwards on the lightness with which you spoke of ‘throwing over’ and ‘giving up’ what you had sacrificed so much to win, I felt you could not realize that you were sacrificing what may never be offered to you again, the disinterested, protecting, shared devotion of an honourable English gentleman. To love and be loved worthily, perfectly—the most aspiring of us cannot hope to get nearer heaven on this side the grave than this!”