“Our friendship with the Aylmers is, of course, at an end; and doubtless this is only the beginning. An easy calculation will tell us how soon we shall be deprived of all acquaintances who number an unmarried male member among their family; perhaps”—the edge of her weapon growing keener, and fancy taking a bitter flight—“perhaps, indeed, the limitation to un-married male members is superfluous!”
Was it a happy moment for the object of this philippic to appear in person to answer it? Happy or unhappy, there she was. Scarcely had the climax of her forebodings as to the ultimate result of her hospitality passed Camilla’s lips when Bonnybell stood before her. But what a Bonnybell! What a blurred, dimmed, dishevelled, altogether lamentable Bonnybell! A drowned toy terrier is the only image that for wretchedness, smallness, dilapidation, and pathos, could at all convey the idea of the figure that now presented itself to its protectors.
“I do not want any luncheon,” the dim ghost said in a voice that matched its face, “and I know that you do not approve of people eating things in their rooms; but thank you so much, all the same, for thinking of it! Oh, if I once begin to thank you, when shall I stop?” She ended with a low wail.
“Don’t be hysterical,” replied Camilla, hastily. “Edward, go and fetch her a glass of port wine and a biscuit. The servants must not see her. There, lie down and go to sleep. What is the use of crying yourself into a jelly just because for once in your life you have behaved properly?”
Edward departed on his errand with the greatest alacrity, glad to escape from the horrible yearning of angry pity that the sight of Bonnybell in her distorted misery inspired him with, and from the grating severity of his wife’s voice. Yet he took with him a feeling more subtly unpleasant than those from which he fled—the suspicion, namely, that the very abandonment of Miss Ransome’s woe was in itself partly a pose. “She might have washed her face and combed her hair,” he said to himself wrathfully; but the wrath, if not quite the suspicion, died down, swallowed in an immense pity as her trembling hand took the offered glass from his, and her sunk and diminished eyes lifted themselves in mute gratitude. “Poor little soul! It can be no parti pris that has dwindled her to half her size; and even if she has tried to make a bid for the compassion of the only friends left to her in the world by intentional accentuation of a forlornness real enough in all conscience without accenting, isn’t she even for that poor deceit the more an object of the profoundest, most lenient sympathy?”
By this time Love’s victim had been ordered to a sofa; and Camilla’s knuckly hands were arranging a crocheted shawl of their own manufacture over the little shivering body with an air of protest that was yet not ungentle.
“You may go now,” she said, addressing her husband brusquely in a key that, though also protesting, yet seemed to convey the impression that her unwonted occupation was not altogether disagreeable to her; “there is nothing to make a fuss about. She will have quite recovered from this silly lapse from self-control by teatime.”
This, as it turned out, was a slight over-statement of Miss Ransome’s powers of recuperation, and when Edward forced himself to reappear at five o’clock, mastering a strong spasm of æsthetic dread at the expected sight of the miserable little object that he had carried on the retina of his eyes throughout his ride, he found, to his relief, that she had asked leave to retire to bed.
“Would it be wise to send for the doctor?” Edward asked rather futilely, and received the withering response he deserved.
“The doctor? Why, Hutton would laugh in my face. She is simply sharing the necessity, common to us all, of enduring the consequences of her own actions. If she will lash up men by illicit means into the state to which she has reduced this headstrong and rather brainless young man, she must not complain of the result. One can only hope that it will be a lesson to her not to repeat the achievement. From what I can gather, I do not think that she had a very agreeable forenoon.”