“So Mrs. Aylmer says,” referring to a letter lying open before her, and relentlessly reading aloud the sentence alluded to. “I cannot, cannot lose my boy—my only boy! And the state he is in gives us well-founded fears for his life or reason.”
A flash of wondering contempt for a life so lightly forfeited and a reason so easily upset, darted across Bonnybell’s brain; but it is needless to say that no hint of such a feeling was to be read on her tiny woe-wrung visage.
“Oh, how little worth enduring so much for I am!” she moaned.
“Very little indeed; but truisms will not help us.”
“What is the use of their coming?” continued the young creature, still with that moaning intonation, but gathering her wits about her, and seasoning pathos with common sense. “What is the use of my seeing them? Nothing is changed. It cannot be that in so short a time they have found out that they have wronged me—that—that the accusation they were so ready to bring against me was a false one?”
A pang of real apprehension nipped Miss Ransome at this supposed solution, but she was quickly reassured.
“Nothing is changed,” replied Mrs. Tancred, solemnly. “Least of all the immutable, eternal law, that we must abide the consequences of our own actions. You have made your bed, and you must lie on it. You had better be in the morning-room by eleven to receive them.”
There was no need for artificial face-whitening now.
“You will be there too?”
“Why should I? It is not I who have brought discord and disunion among them.”