A transient—very transient—gleam of amusement shot through Bonnybell’s brain at the idea of Camilla’s charms working havoc in any happy home, but it was gone, engulfed in gloom before she had realized its presence.
“I know that I have no right to ask it,” she said, throwing all she knew of humility, deference, and desperate beseechment into her voice, “but the knowledge that you were near me—that you thought I was in the right—it is so seldom that you have been able to think me in the right—would be the one thing that could enable me to go through with it. I—I feel rather shaken, after yesterday, and—and as if—I could not bear much more.”
There was a pause. Perhaps the appeal, borne on its helpless low wail, went straight to the ever-empty mother heart of Mrs. Tancred. The girl before her was an ill-conducted little adventuress, but if everything about her, except that clinging attitude of prayer for help and belief in her power to aid, had been different, it would have been sweet to have called her daughter.
CHAPTER XXV
The visitors, arriving ten minutes before their appointed hour, were welcomed—though that is scarcely the word to express the profoundly grave and fully armed civility of Mrs. Tancred’s attitude—by Camilla alone.
“She will not see us?”
The primal emotions had, in one respect, acted upon Mrs. Aylmer in the same manner as upon her son. Gentle and suave-mannered as she usually was, to-day she had evidently forgotten, or at least brushed aside, all the conventions. What place had they in the map of such a calamity as hers?
“Of course, she will see you,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a dignified acquiescence in the abolishing of all preliminaries, and ready, as usual, to go direct to the heart of the matter; “that is to say, if, after what I have to tell you from her, you still think it advisable.”
“What have you to tell us?”—coming a pace or two nearer, as if to snatch the answer more quickly—“that she is ready to renew her engagement? Oh, it must be that.”
“She is not ready to renew it,” replied Camilla, coldly; “why should she be?”