Bonnybell had no years to speak of to forget, and she had plunged and frolicked too; and now stood betrayingly rosy and radiant, surveying the casket of her lost treasure. Something in the tone as well as the eyes of her companion in putting his apparently sympathetic question, sobered her at once.
“You think that I ought not to be so cheerful?” she asked in a troubled tone.
“I am very glad that you should be.”
The answer was not quite up to Edward’s usual standard of amiability; nor could Bonnybell divine that it was irritation with himself at the discovery of how little he really missed the Catherine of past Sundays that gave a touch of ill-nature to his response. She took the faint snub, as she always took all snubs, in unresenting silence; but when they had turned away from the house, and were walking homewards, she meekly took up her own defence.
“Do not you think that one is right, for the sake of the people one lives with, not to show too plainly when one is unhappy?”
“And perhaps, in a way, it is not as great a blow to me as it might have been to some one else, because I have no temperament.” She made this singular confidence quite glibly and without any consciousness of its being unusual. But, used as he now was to her, it startled Edward so much that she was able to add thoughtfully, “Toby has a good deal.”
The shyness resulting from the reception of this obliging revelation was on Mr. Tancred’s side, and it kept him dumb.
“The kind of love I should like to inspire,” continued Miss Ransome, forgetting to kick the snow as she had been doing with childish pleasure, “is the nice quiet sort that would look after me, and keep disagreeable things and people away from me, and never expect anything beyond; but”—with pensive regret, yet not the slightest hesitation—“that is just the kind I never get; what I am offered is always the other—the horrid sort.”
The winter dusk, though nearly due, was, owing to the snow-shine, a little deferred; and it would have been impossible for any one looking at him not to see that Mr. Tancred was growing very much out of countenance. He wished he could stop her, but nothing came to him in time to arrest the still more embarrassing revelation that followed.