He did not ask her what that last and crowning lapse from wisdom had been. He made neither protest nor asseveration, and for a minute or two they sat gravely looking at the ashes in the grate, as if they had been those of her long-departed and his wasted youth. He had taken her hand again, and she suffered him to hold it longer this time. But even while it lay in its cold dryness in his, even while his heart seemed too brimful of ruth, of horrified sorrow and stunned surprise, to have room for any other denizens, there stole into it the insidious thought, “If Bonnybell is to be turned out, what will become of her?”
CHAPTER XXVIII
“The sun has gone in. He was shining quite brightly half an hour ago,” Bonnybell said with a slight but meaning glance at the clock, and an accent of very gentle reproach.
The time for setting out on the weekly Sunday walk had been overpassed by forty minutes, and Miss Ransome was found, when at last joined by her tardy companion, fidgeting up and down the hall, with a look of upbraiding punctuality. Invariably hitherto it had been she that had kept him waiting, yet the strange thing was that even now he offered her no apology. He was too busy thinking what an unconscious aptitude there was in her words, “The sun has gone in.”
Edward would have much preferred to have intermitted the Sunday habit, which had grown so sweet, and which must shortly be abandoned for ever. It seemed an impossible feat in mental gymnastics to twist and wrench his thoughts away from the horrible coil of shocked pain and self-reproach which the last half-hour had wound round them, and turn them and his ears to the little trifling or doubtful topics on which alone Bonnybell’s tongue frisked along with such gay glibness. He had come into the hall with the intention of asking her to let him off, of framing some excuse which would give him freedom to face the tidings of a hideous probability in the solitude which could alone steel him to meet it. But when he saw the girl his intention melted away. There was such obvious relief and pleasure in her little bright face, clearly following upon annoyance and puzzled misgiving, that he saw that his defection would cause her real disappointment—a disappointment, too, for which he could give her no reason.
It was always difficult to Edward to run counter to any one’s wishes; and, after all, what hurry was there for him to realize his wretchedness? He would, in Camilla’s showing, have weeks and months to do it in. Camilla—his poor, valiant, smitten Camilla!
“You need not look so miserable about it,” came a pretty little reassured voice in his ear; “it was only a passing cloud. He will be out again by the time we reach the bridge, and the days are so much longer now; we need not hurry home.”
“Only a passing cloud!” Into how deep an irony the aptitude of her former sentence had turned!
They walked almost in silence till the copse beyond the wooden bridge into the park was reached. There they paused to mark the progress made since last Sunday by the still small low snowdrops beginning to pierce the rain-softened earth. Such advance in the knowledge and appreciation of Nature had been made by Miss Ransome that she had actually perceived them without their being pointed out to her.
“How pretty they are!” she cried with perhaps rather more enthusiasm than the humble blossoms really inspired in her. “I think their French name is prettier still—perce-neige. They always remind me of my old French nurse, Babette; she used to put them on her daughter’s grave in Mont Martre. The poor girl had been unlucky, had a baby and died of it; and Claire bought her a grave en perpétuité. Claire was very kind in those ways.”