“You would not come too, I suppose, to back me up?” she asked with low precipitation, casting a glance out of the corner of her eyes towards Camilla. But her alarm in that direction was unnecessary, as it was one of the rules of Mrs. Tancred’s life always to give her whole attention to the subject that at the moment engaged her; and though her interest in Miss Ransome’s love affair was undoubtedly keener than that she felt for the third housemaid’s quinsy, the latter, while she was being informed of it, entirely swept the former from her attention.
At the strange request made him, Edward’s features took on an expression which the petitioner at once recognized as not one of acquiescence.
“Poor chap, don’t you think he has a right to his last chance?”
“Very well,” she rejoined, with a hysteric laugh, and half holding out a hand. “Good-bye, if you never see me again.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that when a person is in the state of mind he is, poor fellow, one does not know what may happen.”
Her face was white as a magnolia, and yet contradictorily lovelier for the very absence of those reds which had seemed, when present, to make up half its beauty, and her eyes were full of a valedictory solemnity; facts of which, for once, she was all but quite unconscious.
“Do you mean to say that you are afraid of his being personally violent; if so——”
To her disordered fancy there sounded an echo of contempt in the form of the question.
“I am not much apt to be afraid,” she answered quietly, and a something in her tiny face, for all its blanching, confirmed the assertion. “I do not much mind if he does shoot me. What have I to lose now?”