Camilla spoke the last sentence more as if to herself than to her auditor, and left the room immediately afterwards, as if ashamed. The dignity and solemnity of her utterance dispersed the ridicule attendant on such a Priestess of Eros, even in the trivial and hopelessly flippant mind of Bonnybell, and converted her mirth into a more human compassion.
“Poor dear old woman! I wish Edward could bring himself to be a little more demonstrative to her; but it would never do to give him a hint. So I am never to have another Toby! Well”—chuckling and yet shuddering too—“that is a deprivation I can well bear.”
CHAPTER XXIII
The morning had come, and with it Toby. As Bonnybell, propitiatingly punctual, appeared at the exactly nine-o’clock breakfast-table, she was informed by the butler, whose tone—the really perfectly colourless one of a well-trained servant—seemed to her ear vibrating with the compassion which all creation must feel for her, that Mr. Aylmer had been waiting for an hour and a half in the morning-room, and would be glad to speak to her as soon as she was at liberty.
The object of this very morning call cast a dismayed glance at her protectors.
“At home he is never down till long past ten!”
“An extremely bad habit, and a very good thing that he should be broken of it,” answered Camilla, unable, even at so dramatic a moment, to refrain from lifting up her voice in testimony against the vicious indulgence alluded to; but her hand rattled the cups of tea which, in contempt of servants and sideboards, she always made herself.
“I suppose I ought not to keep him waiting any longer,” said Bonnybell, turning with extreme reluctance from the tempting, gleaming table, with its beautiful old green dragon china and its Queen Anne silver, towards the door of doom.
“You had better have a cup of coffee and something to eat first,” Camilla said peremptorily. “A painful scene should never be faced upon an empty stomach.”
The homely common sense of the advice came to the aid of its imperativeness, and Bonnybell eagerly drank the offered coffee, and with some difficulty swallowed a scrap of toast. But still she lingered. The entrance of a servant with a lengthy message for Mrs. Tancred gave the girl the opportunity for a word with Edward, who had not yet sat down to the table.